Spring 2017

ALUMNI ON TAP // THE AUTISM SEX BIAS // ART AND SOUL THE GEORGE WA SHINGTON UNIVERSITY MAGA ZINE SPRING 2017

YVONNE ORJI AT THE GATES THE CO-STAR OF HBO’S INSECURE IS ON THE VERGE OF BREAKING THROUGH TO THE BIG TIME.

An illustration by Corcoran professor and children’s book creator Juana Medina

g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

GW MAGAZINE

SPRING 2017

A MAGA ZINE FOR ALUMNI AND FRIENDS

CONTENTS [Features] 28 / A Line by Line Perspective

Sometimes things don’t work out. Colombian-born Corcoran professor Juana Medina knows this as well as anyone. But the children’s book illustrator and author also knows that sometimes they do, and that's enough to keep her cheery in the face of gloom. / By Matthew Stoss /

36 / The Autism Sex Bias

Boys are diagnosed with autism at more than four times the rate of girls. Scientists are trying to figure out why, but this much is becoming clear: All that we think we know about autism is only half the story. / By Kristen Mitchell /

42 / Yvonne Orji at the Gates

The alumna and co-star of HBO’s Insecure is on the verge of breaking through to the big time. / By Ruth Steinhardt /

48 / Drink at George’s

A by-no-means-complete guide to GW alums working to make every hour happy. / By Matthew Stoss /

[Departments] 4 / Postmarks

On the cover: Photo by William Atkins

7 / GW News 60 / Alumni News g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 1

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LAT EST NEWS FROM GW TODAY VIA E-MAIL

Be Informed | Be Connected | Be Notified gwtoday.gwu.edu

Spring 2017 Volume 27, Issue 2 “Diet Coke is probably tearing a hole in my stomach.

I don’t even want to think about what the bourbon’s doing.”

Speaking of drinks (p. 48), what’s your go-to beverage?

“Nitro stout.

The robust flavors and dense, smooth texture—it’s like settling into a pillow of beer.”

managing editor

// Danny Freedman, BA ’01

assistant editor photo editor

// Matthew Stoss

// William Atkins

university photographer

“Club soda with apple cider vinegar.

Every morning.”

design

// Dominic N. Abbate, BA ’09, MBA ’15 // John McGlasson, BA ’00, MFA ’03

art director

// Keith Harriston (senior managing editor), GW Today contributor

“A glass of viognier. Good ones are more vibrant and rich than most white wines, plus ordering it makes me feel like a sophisticated fancy lady.

‘Vee-own-yay, please.’”

// Logan Werlinger

// GW Marketing & Creative Services

art director

contributor

“Horchata, from a SoCal taco truck at approximately 1am.

It is the drink of its time and place.”

contributor

// Kurtis Hiatt, GW Today // Julyssa Lopez, GW Today

contributor

// Kristen Mitchell, GW Today

contributor

// Ruth Steinhardt, GW Today

intern

“I fell in love with rosé on a springtime trip to Paris—brings back great memories!”

“Thai ice tea, because it’s practically a dessert.”

// Rebecca Manikkam, GWSB ’17

“Sicilian white wines.

Sicily is known mostly for reds, but I think the whites are refreshing and surprisingly affordable.”

Steven Knapp president of the university

Matthew R. Manfra

Lorraine Voles, BA ’81

interim vice president for development and alumni relations

vice president for external relations

Sarah Gegenheimer Baldassaro

Leah Rosen, BBA ’96, MTA ’02

associate vice president for communications

associate vice president for marketing and creative services

“A cool, crisp glass of sauvignon blanc on a warm spring day”

Rachel Muir executive director for editorial services

“Moscow mule. I love the flavor and the ritual of the copper mug.”

GW Magazine (ISSN 2162-6464) is published three times per year by GW’s Division of External Relations, Rice Hall 5th floor, Washington, D.C. 20052. Phone: 202-994-5709; email: magazine@gwu.edu. © 2017 The George Washington University. The George Washington University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action institution.

Opinions expressed in these pages are those of the individuals and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the university.

Please send change-of-address notices to GW Magazine, GW Alumni Records Office, 2033 K St., NW, Suite 300, Washington, D.C. 20052. Notices can also be sent via alumni.gwu.edu/update, email to alumrecs@gwu.edu, or 202-994-3569. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices. postmaster

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 3

POSTMARKS

A Reid Awakening The fall issue’s profile of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, JD ’64 (“Rumble & Sway”), attracted a good bit of attention, including details from the story being picked up in articles by Roll Call and the Washington Examiner. The story elicited some strong feelings.

For instance, that’s a portion of the issue’s cover there, on the right, cut out and taped to the bottom of one reader’s trash can. A selection of other letters, edited for clarity and space, follows.

—Eds. 4 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

In Consideration of Ethics I enjoyed reading the article about Harry Reid and appreciate the candid portrayal of him presented. No doubt, he has been extremely successful politically. At the same time, as a professor of ethics, I am hopeful that no professor at the George Washington University is teaching students the tactics that he employed in his career.

You equate him to Machiavelli for his “brazen intervention in Nevada’s Republican primaries,” using Las Vegas Mayor Jan Jones for his own political purposes, and doing everything he could to “stack the deck in his favor.”

For him to say in 2005 that the so-called nuclear option floated by Republicans “has threatened to break the Senate rules, violate over 200 years of Senate tradition and impair the ability of Democrats and Republicans to work together …” and [then] do that very thing when he was in power in 2013 is an act of hypocrisy that did overturn 200 years of Senate tradition.

Until our society decides once again to uphold integrity, and the other means by which we interact with other people, we will continue to have a polarized country of Machiavellis, whether Democrat or Republican. When there was only one Machiavelli, his tactics may have succeeded.

When many choose to live and work that way, we all suffer.

Eric B. Dent, MBA ’86, PhD ’97

Honesty, Unfiltered Profound thanks to Charles Babington for his insightful and comprehensive article paying tribute to Harry Reid’s 30 years in the U.S. Senate. The photo taken by Gabriella Demczuk, BA ’13, of Reid seated at his desk under a portrait of humorist Mark Twain speaks volumes for the kind of man Reid is.

I was honored to attend President Knapp’s farewell dinner for Sen. Reid. It was held on the same evening that the African American museum held its grand gala opening and, before Reid attended that stellar event, he spent time with fellow law school alumni to reflect on his time at GW’s law school and on his 30-year Senate career. But what I will remember forever was his complete honesty.

Unlike other politicians who claim to retire to spend more time with their families, Reid said that was anything but the truth.

As much as he adored his wife and family, spending more time with them was hardly the best reason for leaving the U.S. Senate.

We laughed and heartedly applauded his complete honesty, his delightful sense of humor and acerbic wit, which, much like Twain, left his audience amused and appreciative of this “consummate insider player, patient listener, keeper of colleagues’ wish lists and his ‘grind-it-out’ work ethic,” as Babington described him. Thank you, GW Magazine for publishing the best portrait of Reid ever, one I intend on keeping.

Kathy A. Megyeri, MEd ’69, MA ’62

A Wedge of Partisanship I was somewhat dismayed when I read your article on Sen. Harry Reid. While the senator may have been a fighter, as you point out, he was not an effective leader and remains one of the prime reasons that our government does not always function as it should.

In fact, most impartial observers of the Senate would conclude that Harry Reid was probably the worst Senate leader in history.

He showed nothing but contempt for Senate foes, pursued personal vendettas and used the Senate floor to attack those he disagreed with. … More than any other individual, Harry Reid contributed to the current-era partisanship and dysfunction of the U.S. Senate. But, even though Harry Reid is not leaving the Senate better than he found it, at least he is leaving.

Barry Cox, BS ’66

GW’s Football Years I received my GW Magazine yesterday and am impressed with Matthew Stoss’ pulling together of so many important strands of GW football history (“One Day in January”).

Using the Sun Bowl story as the focal point, with quotes from Ray Looney, BA ’59, and Mike Sommer, BA ’59, MA ’64, MD ’70, RES ’75, was genius. I think he accurately captured the rollercoaster evolution to that point, the following decline and unceremonious end.

Most alums do not even know that GW ever had a football team. After all, there have been a zillion graduates in the last 50 years!

You have told the story in a way that will engage and surprise them. Thanks for a job well done.

John Whiting, BA ’62

Further Proof I had heard rumors of the school having a football team in the early years, before my time. I was really happy to see the article in the fall issue and, coincidentally, last year I had traveled with the University of Miami Hurricanes (my wife is a proud alumna) to El Paso to attend the annual Sun Bowl.

I had recalled that GWU had been there many years ago from a note in a press guide distributed in the Smith Center, talking about the school’s athletic achievements. In walking through the El Paso Convention Center and seeing the cheerleaders, marching band and attending a pre-game pep rally, I looked up and noticed among the flags flying was [one for GW’s 1957 Sun Bowl victory]. I proudly took a picture of it to prove to my wife that we, too, had a great college football team once.

Howard S. Toland, BA ’78

Potential for a Wider Footprint I enjoyed the article by Matthew Stoss about the two graduates who designed a new type of shoe that allows easier access by the foot, and does not require bending over for lacing up (“A Shoe in Transition”).

They mentioned that it was intended for athletes. I am a special education teacher for children with developmental disabilities, and I have a son who also has a developmental disability. Over the years, I’ve seen that many of my students are not able to tie their shoes, and struggle even with getting them on. The type of shoes these two men were describing would be ideal for that part of the population, as well.

A View From Behind the Scenes I just read your piece on the National Museum of African American History (“Out of the Margins”), and wanted to compliment you on a wonderful alumni profile of Michèle Gates-Moresi. I have been thrilled to work alongside her the last two years.

What caused me pause, however, is how many GW alumni work at NMAAHC who were not mentioned. Dozens of us, including many recent graduates of the Museum Studies Program, have spent years working on the museum, cataloging objects; traveling to authenticate and document pieces; installing dozens of cases; interfacing with donors; writing labels; and performing hours and hours of research on the collections to tell their stories to the world.

Young alums are very rarely profiled/ featured in stories like these (a challenge I also see in the other non-GW alumni publications I receive). Especially in a field like museums, it creates this perceived experience gap that makes it difficult for current students to conceive of themselves in similar roles or understand a career pathway to those positions. As someone making a career in the museum field, it is daunting to enter, especially in a place like D.C., where the Smithsonian seems almost untouchable for entry-level positions. Alumni publications could really help bridge that gap!

Ayla Amon, MA ’12

All Write!

We want to hear from you, too.

Contact us through our website, gwmagazine.com, on Twitter (@TheGWMagazine) or send a note to:

GW Magazine 2121 Eye Street, NW Suite 501 Washington, DC 20052 magazine@gwu.edu Please include your name, degree/ year, address and a daytime phone number.

Letters may be edited for clarity and space.

Jeff Lea, BA ’86

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 5

GWNEWS F rom t h e A rc h i v e s ____________ 1 4 5 qu e s t ions _______________________ 19 Ge orge W el c om e s _____________ 2 0 B o ok Sh elv e s ____________________ 2 2 sp ort s ____________________________ 2 4

[administration]

W I L L I A M AT K I N S

University’s 17th President Announced Thomas LeBlanc, executive vice president and provost at the University of Miami, begins Aug. 1, fueled by belief that higher ed is the nation’s “strongest force for social mobility.” // By Kurtis Hiatt

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 7

GW NEWS he story of his life, Thomas LeBlanc says, is one defined by education.

“At age 5, I left home to go to school, and every step of the way I never took a break,” he said in January at his first public audience at GW, outlining an unbowed, decadeslong trajectory through high school, college, graduate school and a career in teaching and university administration. He’s moved straight through, he said, “because I love it.”

“I believe in the transformative power of higher education in the United States. I believe we have the best system of higher education in the world. And I believe it is the strongest force for social mobility in the United States,” he said. “And that’s what gets me up in the morning, being a part of that.”

Starting in August, Dr. LeBlanc will be waking up to a new chapter in that story as GW’s 17th president, after his hire was unanimously approved by the GW Board of Trustees on Jan. 6.

Dr. LeBlanc currently serves as executive vice president, provost and a professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at the University of Miami. He is both the chief academic officer and the chief budget officer, responsible for the university’s 11 schools and colleges, the library system, the division of student affairs, the division of continuing and international education, and undergraduate education,

admissions and financial aid.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from the State University of New York and a Master of Science and PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin.

“To come to a place as distinguished as George Washington University at this moment in time, in this great city, is not only a great honor, it’s a great challenge” and, Dr. LeBlanc said at the announcement event, “an incredibly exciting adventure.”

He will succeed President Steven Knapp, who announced last year that he will be stepping down when his contract expires at the end of July, after a decade at the helm.

The appointment of Dr. LeBlanc concludes a monthslong process led by a search committee—comprising members of the board and the faculty, and a representative of the alumni, staff and student bodies—which unanimously recommended his hire.

The search team had worked in consultation with an elected faculty committee and the Faculty Senate’s executive committee, as well as soliciting wider community input during more than 30 town-hall-style events. Feedback during this process helped shape a presidential profile used to advertise the position.

In the end, board of trustees member and chair of the search committee Madeleine Jacobs, BS ’68, HON ’03, said Dr. LeBlanc “fits this profile to the letter.”

“In Dr. LeBlanc, we saw a person who will elevate GW’s academic excellence, enhance the student experience and ensure that the university remains a diverse and inclusive partner with every segment of the university and local communities,” she said at the announcement.

Board of Trustees Chair Nelson Carbonell, BS ’85, said that in making reference calls about Dr. LeBlanc, he repeatedly got the impression that Dr. LeBlanc “was someone who in the computer science world we call WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get.”

Dr. LeBlanc—who also served as interim president of the University of Miami in 2015 and rose through the academic ranks at the University of Rochester in faculty and administrative roles—said he always knew it would take an “incredible opportunity” to leave his current job.

“When they called about GW, the first thing I thought was, ‘This is one of those incredible opportunities,’” he said.

And as he prepares to move into the presidency, Dr. LeBlanc made a pledge: that he will spend a lot of time listening.

“I don’t come in with a master plan template that I’ve applied in all my previous jobs,” he said. “... I believe every institution has its own unique characteristics, traditions, histories and community, and all of those things help define best future pathways for the institution.”

W I L L I A M AT K I N S

Thomas LeBlanc addresses an audience at Betts Theatre in January, at the announcement that he will be GW’s next president.

8 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, MA ’92 (D-Ill.)

D U C K W O R T H : C O U R T E S Y TA M M Y D U C K W O R T H / W E S T: L O G A N W E R L I N G E R / B A R O N : C O U R T E S Y T H E W A S H I N G T O N P O S T

[graduation]

Sen. Tammy Duckworth to Headline Commencement The alumna will be joined by the U.S. Army surgeon general, also an alumna, and by The Washington Post’s executive editor Purple Heart recipient and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, MA ’92, will deliver the university’s commencement address before an audience of 25,000 graduates and friends and family members May 21 on the National Mall.

She’ll be honored alongside Lt. Gen. Nadja West, MD ’88, the U.S. Army surgeon general and commanding general of the U.S. Army Medical Command, and Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron. Each of the three will receive an honorary Doctor of Public Service degree.

Calling Sen. Duckworth (D-Ill.) one of GW’s “most distinguished alumni,” university President Steven Knapp says she “embodies a spirit of service and sacrifice that has inspired our many GW veterans and our university as a whole.”

She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016 after serving two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Sen. Duckworth is a former assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs and was among the first Army women to fly combat missions during Operation

Iraqi Freedom. She was a member of the Reserve Forces for 23 years before retiring in 2014, becoming an advocate for people with disabilities while recovering from combat wounds she received after her Black Hawk helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in 2004. She lost both legs in the attack.

Dr. West, a three-star general, is the highestranking black woman in U.S. Army history and the highest-ranking woman to graduate from West Point. A combat veteran who formerly served as the U.S. Joint Staff surgeon, she now oversees the Army’s 150,000 medical service members and civilians as well as its hospitals and clinics,

and advises the Army chief of staff and the secretary of the Army on medical issues.

Mr. Baron, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, joined The Washington Post in 2013 and manages its news operation.

During his time at The Washington Post, the newspaper has won Pulitzers for coverage of secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, the food stamps program in America, security lapses in the U.S. Secret Service and a project detailing every killing by a police officer nationwide in 2015.

Previously, he was editor of The Boston Globe when the newspaper investigated the cover up of widespread sexual abuse by Catholic priests that inspired the film Spotlight.

He also was executive editor of the Miami Herald and worked at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

left Lt. Gen. Nadja West, MD ’88 right Marty Baron

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 9

[sports]

‘I’d Love To, But I’m in Iceland.’

A sophomore juggles classes, social life and the international figure skating circuit as she reaches for a degree and a spot in the 2018 Olympics. // By Kristen Mitchell One could conceivably sit next to Colette Kaminski in class all semester and never know she is a world-class athlete—she would never bring it up. The pair of bright white but well-worn figure skates in the bottom of her bag tells a different story. So do the dazzling costumes tucked away in her dorm room closet.

The international affairs and political science major is also a figure skater for the Polish national team. It’s a time-consuming side of her life—10 to 15 hours a week practicing at D.C.-area rinks and, this past fall, traveling to Europe nearly every month for competitions—that she tends to keep private, even from friends.

“One of my friends last year texted me and asked if I wanted to grab lunch, and I was like, ‘I’d love to, but I’m in Iceland,’” says Ms. Kaminski, who goes by CoCo. She grew up the youngest of four in Minnetonka Beach, Minn., a place where everyone learns to skate, she says. Her father is from Poland, which makes her a dual citizen. In fall 2013, the Polish Figure Skating Association contacted her about joining the program.

For college, she was looking for a more relaxed local skating culture and proximity to international airports.

“I wanted to have a normal enough college experience, and I wanted to get away from home, and I wanted to try something new and get a fresh start, skating-wise and schoolwise,” she says. “So that was kind of a give and a take, but it has worked out well.”

Chasing her ambitions—including, soon, vying for a spot in the 2018 Olympics— comes at the sacrifice of some aspects of college life, though. She missed Inauguration 1 0 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

Day festivities and last year’s massive snow storm because of international competitions.

And for the past two years, Poland’s national skating championship has fallen during finals week.

“It’s really hard,” Ms. Kaminski says. “I don’t know exactly how I do it all the time.

I’m just always busy, I like being busy.”

In January, she missed the first two weeks of class while competing in the 2017 European Championships in the Czech Republic, the last contest of her season.

She finished 30th, after falling just before the end of her routine. “Obviously, I wasn’t pleased,” she says. But the years of competing have emboldened her to brush off mistakes and move forward, on and off the ice.

“Skating has taught me an abundant amount about perseverance and working hard, and I think that has blended with challenges in my personal life.”

In May, Ms. Kaminski begins months of intensive training back in Minnesota— extending through the fall 2017 semester, which she plans to miss—all with an eye toward making the cut for February’s Winter Olympics in South Korea.

In September, she’ll skate in a qualifying competition in Oberstdorf, Germany, alongside other athletes from small federations. The top six finishers go on to the Olympics.

Sophomore Callahan Vertin has known Ms. Kaminski since freshman year of high school, and often acts as a hype man for her friend, being the one to bring up Ms. Kaminski’s skating chops to new acquaintances.

“Nobody really knows what she is doing because she’s not posting about it,” she says.

But as the Winter Games inch closer, she’s noticing her friend opening up about her training and her skating career. “I think she’s finally starting to realize that she could really make it to the Olympics,” Ms. Vertin says.

Talk of the Olympics makes her nervous, Ms. Kaminsky says. But she’s willing to allow that if she trains well and nails her routine in Germany, she has a shot.

“It’s doable,” she says. “I would say it’s doable.”

LOG AN WERLINGER

GW NEWS

[Music]

I L L U S T R AT I O N : D O M I N I C N . A B B AT E / H AT P H O T O G R A P H : W I L L I A M AT K I N S

The Viral Voice of the Women’s March The GW Sirens comprised half of the group behind a protest song heard 15 million times // By Ruth Steinhardt

In the wake of the Women’s March on Washington in January, a song called “Quiet” arose as a kind of unofficial anthem. Video of an a cappella choir of pink-hatted women— half of them GW students—quickly caught fire on the internet.

Fronted by musician Connie Lim (known professionally as MILCK), the video of the all-female GW Sirens singing with the D.C.area women’s group Capital Blend has notched 15 million views on Facebook alone.

Celebrities like Harry Potter actress Emma Watson featured it on their social media streams.

By the next week, a smaller version

“We ate pizza and talked of the group was performing about our feelings surrounding the song live on TBS’ Full the election and the march,” Ms. Geller says.

Frontal with Samantha Bee. The “Girl stuff.” group also recorded a professionalOn the day of the march, the choir moved quality version of the track, with all through the crush of protesters, assembling proceeds from it going to women’s nonprofit several times to sing. organizations.

“It’s always crazy until you start singing, “It’s been surreal,” says junior Juliette and then you channel all that energy into Geller, the Sirens’ publicity manager. “It all the music,” says Madison Sherman, the happened so quickly.”

Sirens’ musical Ms. Lim wrote director. Looking “Quiet” to deal with the Watch the GW Sirens perform at the audience, emotional trauma of an “Quiet” on TBS’ Full Frontal. she was jolted by abusive relationship, but Visit go.gwu.edu/sirensquiet. the intensity of the never released it, she response. “We saw told The Washington women crying, men crying—people were so Post. After the election of Donald Trump moved.” in November, she began to see a broader During one of those performances, application for her song as a source of filmmaker Alma Har’el was nearby and healing and a call to action for women upset started recording video on her phone. by the political climate.

“This song and its sentiment made me cry She arranged “Quiet” for an all-female a tears of relief the whole time I was filming cappella choir and planned to perform it in it,” she wrote in her Facebook post that went “flash mobs” at the women’s march, the day viral. “The beauty and the harmony of their after inauguration. voices captured for me how women can come Ms. Lim, who is based in Los Angeles, together to find their voice.” reached out to the Sirens after finding their For the singers, “Quiet” has resonance website. Over the next few both global and personal. weeks, the group adapted “[Ms. Lim] always told us to think about and refined the arrangement, who we were singing for and why we were practicing with Ms. Lim over there,” Ms. Sherman says. “We were singing Skype. The Sirens and Capital for our moms, for our sisters, for the people Blend finally met her in person who helped us get here.” two days before the march. g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 1 1

GW NEWS “Now I am asking ... that we offer our support and friendship to our international students, faculty members and staff who are rightly concerned about their and their families’ future in a nation that, in its proudest moments, has opened its doors to the hopes and aspirations of all people.”

–President Steven Knapp, in a Jan. 30 letter to the GW community—including its more than 4,000 students who hail from some 130 countries— addressing President Donald Trump’s initial executive order restricting travel to the United States, later blocked by the courts. In March, as Mr. Trump issued a revised order, the university announced that it had joined the more than 100 colleges and universities in the #YouAreWelcomeHere campaign, including putting up posters around campus that read “You Are Welcome Here” in multiple languages.

[science]

Belief in Climate Change Hinges on Local Forecast A new study finds that local weather may play an important role in determining Americans’ belief in climate change: People who recently experienced record-low temperatures are less likely to believe the Earth is warming compared to those who have experienced record highs, researchers found.

“The idea here is that individuals make decisions about climate change not just based on what they read in the news, but what they experience,” says GW geography professor Michael Mann, a co-author of the study.

The research, conducted by scientists at several institutions, was published in 1 2 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

December in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“One of the greatest challenges to communicating scientific findings about climate change is the cognitive disconnect between local and global events,” Dr. Mann says. “It is easy to assume that what you experience at home must be happening elsewhere.”

Experts say climate change will have a diverse set of effects. It may cause some regions to get cooler in the short run while others grow warmer, but past characterizations of the global shift have

seeded doubt with a paucity of skeptics.

“Unfortunately climate change was very early on framed as just climate warming,” Dr. Mann says. “If someone has a big snowstorm with a new recordlow temperature, they may look at climate change and think, ‘Oh, that can’t be right.’”

For the study, researchers looked at data from more than 18,000 local weather stations across the country and temperatures recorded there. That information was compared to survey-based estimates of the beliefs of people living nearby.

The authors note that differentiating between the terms “weather,” which they define as the temperatures of a short period of time, like a season, and “climate,” average temperatures over two or three decades, may be helpful in communicating more effectively. —Kristen Mitchell

W I L L I A M AT K I N S

[Art] Hand-drawn “fundred” dollar bills—455,820 of them and counting—from around the country fill the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design’s rotunda in March for the opening of the “Fundred Reserve,” an exhibition organized by Mel Chin, the William Wilson Corcoran Visiting Professor of Community Engagement. The show is an outgrowth his Fundred Dollar Bill Project, which aims to raise awareness of the threat of lead poisoning in children. g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 1 3

GW NEWS

[From the archives]

‘We shall never have equal rights until we take them, nor respect until we command it.’ // By Ruth Steinhardt 1 4 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

More than a century before Hillary Clinton vied to make history in November as the first female president of the United States, a woman named Belva Ann Lockwood fought to become the first to appear on a ballot.

Running the first full U.S. presidential campaign as a female candidate might, in fact, have been the least of Ms. Lockwood’s accomplishments. She petitioned a president for her law degree, supported her family with her own legal business at a time when it was almost unheard of for a woman to do so, and became the first woman to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court. The GW Law School now gives out an annual award in her name to celebrate the accomplishments of alumnae.

Hers was a remarkable legal career—and it began at a college that would become GW. Ms. Lockwood was a 36-year-old widow with a daughter when she moved to Washington, D.C., in 1866. She came, as she later wrote in an autobiographical article for Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, “for no other purpose than to see what was being done at this great political centre,—this seething pot,—to learn something of the practical

LIBR ARY OF CONGRESS / PHOTOGR APH BY HARRIS & E WING

Belva Ann Lockwood, long ago spurned

by GW and now celebrated, waged a historic battle for the presidency at a time when she wasn’t even allowed to vote.

workings of the machinery of government, and to see what the great men and women of the country felt and thought.”

She took a job as a teacher and, during her free afternoons, “listened to the debates in Congress and the arguments in the United States Supreme Court, investigated the local government of the District [and] visited her public buildings.”

Following a lifelong passion for the law, she eventually applied for admittance to the entering law class at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. Then-President George W. Samson would eventually respond to her request as follows.

Madam,—The Faculty of Columbian College have considered your request to be admitted to the Law Department of this institution, and, after due consultation, have considered that such admission would not be expedient, as it would be likely to distract the attention of the young men.

Ms. Lockwood was “chagrined,” but not deterred. The National University Law School, which would later merge with GW, opened its classes to women the next year, and Ms. Lockwood accepted an invitation to attend.

Of the 15 women who initially matriculated, she would be one of only two to complete the full course of the law degree.

But male students still complained, some declaring that they would not graduate with women.

Soon Ms. Lockwood and her only remaining female classmate were barred from attending lectures. As commencement neared, she wrote, “it became evident that we were not to receive our diplomas, nor be permitted to appear on the stage with the young men at graduation.”

Without that diploma, Ms. Lockwood would be unable to gain admission to the D.C. bar.

“For a time I yielded quite ungracefully to the inevitable,” she wrote. But by 1873 she was no longer willing to wait. She wrote to U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant, then president ex officio of the National University Law School.

SIR, You are, or you are not, President of the National University Law School.

If you are its President, I desire to say to you that I have passed through the curriculum of study in this school, and am entitled to, and demand, my diploma. If you are not its President, then I ask that you take your name from its papers, and not hold out to the world to be what you are not.

Very respectfully, Belva A. Lockwood She never received a direct reply—but a week later, her diploma arrived in the mail.

Now the second woman attorney admitted to the bar in Washington, she opened her own practice. By 1879, thanks to what one reporter called “an unconscionable deal of lobbying,” she was the first woman admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court, and a year later she became the first woman to argue a case there.

In 1884, Ms. Lockwood wrote to progressive newspaper owner Marietta Stow, who was running as an independent for governor of California as a kind of political theater to demonstrate the irony of women’s inability to vote. The letter was supportive and passionate.

… If women in the States are not permitted to vote, there is no law against their being voted for, and if elected, filling the highest office in the gift of the people.

Two of the present political parties which have candidates in the field believe in woman suffrage. It would have been well had some of the candidates been women. There is no use in attempting to avoid the inevitable. … It is quite time that we had our own party; our own platform, and our own nominees. We shall never have equal rights until we take them, nor respect until we command it.

In response, Ms. Stow wrote to Ms. Lockwood nominating her as the National Equal Rights Party’s candidate for president. She accepted.

The campaign might, like Ms. Stow’s, have been considered political theater.

Newspapers, established politicians and even fellow women’s rights activists objected to her “nasal” voice, her clothes, her hairstyle and her habit of riding a tricycle to get from place to place. Groups of dozens of young men in bonnets, dresses and parasols showed up at political rallies to mock her and her supporters.

Still, Ms. Lockwood treated her own candidacy as a serious one. Her speeches, according to biographer Jill Norgen, tended to focus on major economic issues rather than those specific to women—a practice which led Susan B. Anthony to declare her positions “too much like a rehash of the men’s speeches.” But she also advocated for progressive causes like equal pay, citizenship for Native Americans and, of course, universal suffrage.

She was not the first woman to run for president. That record goes to Victoria Woodhull, who sought the office alongside running mate Frederick Douglass in 1872.

But historians do not agree as to whether Ms. Woodhull’s name actually appeared on any nationwide ballots or whether she received any votes. (She also would have been just 34 on Inauguration Day of 1873— too young to hold presidential office.)

On Election Day, Ms. Lockwood had convinced electors to pledge to her in at least seven states, including New Hampshire, California, Maryland, New York and Oregon. She would end up getting nearly 5,000 votes, while Democrat Grover Cleveland clinched the victory.

Belva Lockwood would continue to crusade for women’s rights until her death in 1917, missing by three years the ratification of the 19th Amendment and the legal right of American women to vote. Toward the end of Ms. Lockwood’s life, a journalist asked whether she still believed that a woman could be president.

She answered: “If [a woman] demonstrates that she is fitted to be president she will some day occupy the White House. It will be entirely on her own merits, however.

No movement can place her there simply because she is a woman. It will come if she proves herself mentally fit for the position.” g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 1 5

GW NEWS [presidential history]

Saving Wisps of Web Project aims to archive the social media presence of the Obama administration

This winter, as a new U.S. president was preparing to set up shop in D.C., the GW Libraries were working to preserve an ephemeral portion of the outgoing president’s administration: the floods of material posted on social media by federal entities.

The effort is part of the End of Term Presidential Harvest 2016, or EOT, a collaborative volunteer project to preserve public U.S. government websites. Partners include the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Government Publishing Office and libraries at the University of North Texas and Stanford University.

“This is part of American history,” says Laura Wrubel, software development librarian at the GW Libraries. “If someone in the future wanted to research this period, if they didn’t know about the government’s web presence—long gone by then—they would be missing a huge part of our history.”

This is the third EOT, with previous harvests at the end of George W. Bush’s second term in 2008 and at the end of Barack Obama’s first term in 2012. But it’s the first preservation effort to include social media.

“The government doesn’t consider all of their social media to be part of the federal record,” says Daniel Kerchner, senior software developer at the GW Libraries.

“They have an obligation to capture some of it, but even so, that doesn’t mean it would be available to researchers or to the general public.”

The GW Libraries’ major innovation is open-source software called Social Feed Manager, developed as a prototype in 2012 and improved since 2014 with a grant from the U.S. National Archives’ 1 6 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

National Historical Publications & Records Commission. The software archives not only the text of a post on a social media platform like Twitter, Flickr or Tumblr, but also the metadata—time of posting, number of likes or retweets—associated with that post.

The GW Libraries team started by using the U.S. Digital Registry to compile a comprehensive list of accounts constituting the government’s social media presence, including agencies, offices and public figures.

The results were overwhelming. The first harvest covered almost 3,000 accounts and captured more than 5.5 million tweets.

Part of the complexity of the project lies in ensuring its durability. Historians now use physical artifacts like letters and documents to recapture a lost past, Mr. Kerchner points out. But few such relics will be accessible to researchers in the future.

“You don’t even have to think that far ahead,” he says. “What if you had data stored on diskettes from 15 years ago? How would you even read that now?”

Even the language by which we understand social media is in constant evolution.

“In five years,” Ms. Wrubel says, “will people understand what it means to click the

“This is part of American history.

If someone in the future wanted to research this period, if they didn’t know about the government’s web presence—long gone by then—they would be missing a huge part of our history.”

5.5 MILLION TWEETS ‘heart’ on Twitter? It used to be a star. We’re starting to see questions like that.”

In this case, data collected by the EOT will be stored digitally on the Internet Archive, which will have to evolve to stay accessible.

“That’s one advantage of working with partners like the Internet Archive who are strong in this area,” Mr. Kerchner says.

“They’ve been around for 20 years or so, and their reason for existing is to make web history available.” —Ruth Steinhardt

[RESEARCH BRIEFS]

LEMUR: iSTOCK .COM/IJDEMA

/ S AT E L L I T E : C O U R T E S Y V E C T O R

A FACEBOOK FOR LEMURS

A team of biologists and computer scientists has developed a facial-recognition system capable of identifying individual lemurs in the wild. The system, called LemurFaceID, could be a boon to conservation efforts and to evolutionary studies, which require longterm data that, in the past, has meant lemurs needed to be trapped and tagged, says Rachel Jacobs, a biological anthropologist at GW’s Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology.

CONSUMPTION OF LOW-CALORIE SWEETENERS UP

The number of children in the United States consuming food and drinks that contain low-calorie sweeteners jumped by 200 percent—to 25 percent of kids, up from 8.7 percent—between 1999 and 2012, according to a new study by researchers at the Milken Institute School of Public Health. About 41 percent of adults—a 54 percent increase— reported consuming low-calorie sweeteners, which may be linked to diabetes and obesity.

The researchers say the findings suggest that parents may not realize the terms “light” or “no added sugar” may mean that a product contains a low-calorie sweetener.

1999

2012

PLASMA-THRUSTING INTO THE FINAL FRONTIER

Technology created at GW soon could be powering the next generation of space exploration. Vector Space Systems, a microsatellite space launch company, in December licensed the inch-long plasma thrusters created by engineering professor Michael Keidar and researchers in his lab, which allow for more-efficient propulsion and control of the cost-effective and increasingly popular class of miniature satellites. Vector plans to develop the thrusters for commercialization, while GW engineers will continue to improve the technology.

The jump in the percentage of U.S. kids who consume food and drinks with low-calorie sweeteners

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 1 7

GW NEWS

IN BRIEF SCIENCE & ENGINEERING HALL ELLIOTT SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

Washington’s first research center dedicated to Winston Churchill opened in October on the first floor of Gelman Library.

The National Churchill Library and Center, constructed with funds donated by the International Churchill Society, is open to the public and will focus primarily on hosting programming and scholarly discussions on leadership through the lens of the World War II-era British prime minister.

Officials cut the ribbon on GW’s Institute for Korean Studies in January.

The institute, created through support from the Academy for Korean Studies, aims to strengthen the existing Korean studies program while promoting Korean humanities and fostering links to other fields, like business and engineering.

GELMAN LIBRARY

1 8 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

FULBRIGHT AWARDS

The number of Fulbright awards given to GW undergrad and graduate students for 2016-17.

The university announced in March that the Clark Charitable Foundation has made an $8 million gift to expand a scholarship program that offers select engineering students financial assistance and opportunities for professional development, leadership training and networking. The Clark Engineering Scholars Program began in 2011 with an $8 million gift from A. James Clark, a GW trustee emeritus and the founder of Clark Enterprises, who died in 2015.

RICE HALL

GW’s ranking among mid-sized schools in producing Peace Corps volunteers, marking its 11th consecutive year in the top five. Currently, 45 GW alumni serve in the Peace Corps; 1,232 have served since its founding in 1961.

Aristide J. Collins Jr., GW’s vice president for development and alumni relations as well as secretary of the university, will chair a working group coordinating the transition for incoming university President Thomas LeBlanc. The new responsibilities mean that Mr. Collins will return fulltime to the board of trustees office as vice president and secretary. Matthew R. Manfra, who became associate vice president for alumni relations in 2015, will serve as interim vice president for the Division of Development and Alumni Relations.

Sean Murphy, the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law, was reelected in November to a fiveyear term on the United Nations International Law Commission, among 33 others from around the world.

LAW SCHOOL

[5 Questions]

... On the War on Cancer Medical oncologist Eduardo Sotomayor is the director of the new GW Cancer Center.

Established last year as a nucleus of all cancerrelated activity, from research to clinical care— set up by the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, GW Hospital, the GW Medical Faculty Associates (an independent physician group) and the Milken Institute School of Public Health—the center opened in December at the top of Science and Engineering Hall, where floor-to-ceiling windows open a bird’seye view of the city. Dr. Sotomayor launched his career studying cancer immunotherapy— efforts to kickstart an immune system stymied by cancer—which he continues as he expands GW’s work into new directions, from the microbiome to one-stop patient care. (This interview has been edited for space and clarity.)

Congrats on the new space. This must feel like a very tangible expression of the commitment to the cancer center.

It’s a great space. One thing I like about this building is that we have engineers, chemists, anthropologists, the School of Public Health, and we are establishing collaborations with them. One of the most exciting is this synergy that we found with engineers that’s allowing us to think differently. They are always willing to learn. They say, what is cancer? How are cancers divided? How many cancer cells are in the tumor? And then they start to talk about physics, the space, how having more malignant cells in a confined space actually made metastasis easier, not more difficult—I had the wrong concept. So now we are working with physicists to try to answer important biological questions.

That’s the beauty of being in this building.

It’s sort of like the United Nations: we talk different languages … [but] when we get together we can identify problems and work together toward a common goal.

MICHAEL LEONG

What’s the focus of the center?

We are focusing on four scientific programs.

One is cancer immunotherapy. The second problem is cancer biology, which involves the genetics, epigenetics, signaling and genomics of cancer. The third problem is cancer engineering and technology. The fourth is microbial oncology. With that, we are interested in viruses and other microbes, but also we are trying to understand the

microorganisms that live within us— the microbiome—which can influence cancer development. This field is in its infancy.

Should the emphasis now be on a cure, treatment or prevention?

Prevention is going to be the answer. If you imagine cancer being a book with 20 chapters, what we’re doing now is focusing on the last chapter: diagnosis and treatment. For example, in a 50-year old patient with melanoma, his cancer started long before, when his skin got exposed to sun every day without protection. Plus, no society has the resources to make investments only in cancer diagnosis and treatment.

It’s going to get more and more expensive, so we need to be more aggressive in terms of prevention.

Are there clinical and basic science things that can be done for prevention?

Oh yes, there are different types of prevention. For primary prevention, aimed at avoiding disease in the first place, we are

Eduardo Sotomayor

building a team composed of clinicians and population scientists to focus in particular on people who are at a high risk of developing cancer. For example, investigators at the Cancer Center are evaluating the diabetes drug metformin to see if it can prevent the development of some cancers. In terms of secondary prevention, for people who have already had cancer, we are trying to find biomarkers that can identify patients at high risk for developing secondary malignancies.

You got into this research not through cancer, but through immunology. What was it that got you hooked?

When I was at University of Miami, my mentor, Diana Lopez, was working on how the immune system recognized breast cancer in animal models. The potential was there, so I was intrigued. And it was a great opportunity because it was an empty field: Ninety percent of the scientific community did not believe in cancer immunology. So I said, “OK, I want to do that. It’s a challenge.”

The way immunotherapy is working now for some patients, it exceeds my expectations by a thousand percent. I mean, metastatic lung cancer— when I was a fellow, it was chemotherapy or hospice. Now it’s immunotherapy. For me, though, it’s like the pendulum is moving too far. We’re abandoning targeted therapy and not paying attention to other emerging areas, like the microbiome. I think there should be a parallel growth of immunotherapy with other strategies.

So this is the beginning of a new era. We will make progress as we understand more about the mechanisms.

But also we need to be careful about unleashing the immune system against cancer, because it can cause significant collateral damage and hurt patients.

— Danny Freedman, BA ’01

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 1 9

GEORGE WELCOMES “The press plays a healthy role in democracy, no question about it.

But they’re not the only game in town anymore.”

“We are one-third of the court.

We look like we are there to stay—and anyone who has observed an argument knows that my newest colleagues are not shrinking violets.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the court, saying that the presence of female colleagues Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor “makes a great difference.” She spoke at GW in February with NPR’s Nina Totenberg, which was co-sponsored by the Newseum and the Supreme Court Fellows Association.

“For those guys, it cost them money, fame and stature. It took their lives and careers in a direction they didn’t have to go.”

Michael Wilbon, co-host of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, discussing the iconic image of Tommy Smith’s and John Carlos’ black-gloved raised fists from the winner’s podium during the 1968 Olympics. He spoke in February as part of a panel—with Kevin Merida, an ESPN senior vice president and editor of The Undefeated, and Jason Reid, the magazine’s senior NFL writer—on black athletes and activism. The event was moderated by Washington Post reporter and journalism professor Cheryl W. Thompson, and sponsored by GW’s Association of Black Journalists, the Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity, and the School of Media and Public Affairs.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, on President Donald Trump’s ability to communicate directly to the public via social media. Mr. Spicer spoke in January with School of Media and Public Affairs Director Frank Sesno as part of a forum on Mr. Trump’s relationship with the media.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Sean Spicer

Michael Wilbon

S P I C E R : L O G A N W E R L I N G E R / G I N S B U R G : W I L L I A M AT K I N S /

h e a dl i n er s at u n i v er si t y e v en t s

WILBON: HARRISON JONES

GW NEWS

KLOBUCHAR,BELCHER: LOG AN WERLINGER R YA N , G R A H A M , M C C A I N : W I L L I A M A K T I N S / S A N D E R S , C R U Z : H A R R I S O N J O N E S

“The law is bigger than any one person’s tweet. The law is bigger than any one person’s rhetoric.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), on the authority of the legislative and judicial branches to keep the executive branch in check. She spoke in December with U.S. Sens. James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) on a panel moderated

by CNN Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash, BA ’93, and SMPA Director Frank Sesno.

“You young people are about to inherit this mess if we continue to kick it down the road. So you got to solve it.”

Political analyst and former Obama campaign pollster Cornell Belcher, addressing a largely student audience about the need for a national conversation about race, racial politics and tribalism. He and SMPA Director Frank Sesno discussed Mr. Belcher’s new book, A Black Man in the White House, in which he argues that the Obama presidency triggered a rise in racial aversion.

Cornell Belcher

Amy Klobuchar

[POLITICS] In the first months of the year, CNN hosted a series of live, prime-time town halls at GW that brought in some of the biggest names in politics. Here’s a brief look at what they said:

“What we have to do is find a way that you can get right with the law, and we’re going to do this in a good way so that the rug doesn’t get pulled out from under you, and your family gets separated,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said in response to an audience member who said she was brought to the U.S. from Mexico at age 11 and gained protection under an Obama-era program. With her young daughter beside her, she asked if he thought she should be deported.

Asked about the issue of sanctuary cities, U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the government should be cracking down on them, withholding federal funds if necessary.

“When laws are passed, federal laws that apply to the United States of America, municipalities cannot exempt themselves,” he said.

“We judge people on who they are, not where your grandfather came from or your religion,” U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said, discussing immigration and what he saw as divisive rhetoric. “That is a principle that we have got to fight for, that’s a fundamental principle.”

“Government control messed this all up,” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in a discussion about health care and the Affordable Care Act. “I want to put you in charge of our health care, not the government.”

“Vladimir Putin is not a friend to democracy. He is a crook,” said U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

“I wish our president, who I want to help, would stand up to Putin and say, ‘An attack on one party in America is an attack on all of us.’” g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 2 1

showc a si ng n e w b o ok s b y g w prof e s s or s a n d a lu m n i

BOOKSHELVES Writing In (and Of) the Dark In her dark and disquieting novel, Shelter, professor Jung Yun displays a professional fidelity to trauma. /By Menachem Wecker, MA ’09 / From the start, Jung Yun’s novel Shelter takes readers to a dark place, and very early on, that setting becomes scarier and more violent. Ms. Yun, a GW assistant English professor who describes herself as a lateblooming writer, penned the first lines of the novel in 2004; she left the book for several years, and then came back to it in 2010. This long “incubation period,” imagining such tragic characters, changed the way she views the craft of writing.

“I always thought it was such a cliché when people talked about characters taking over, but in many ways it felt like they did,” she says. “I got to know these characters very well. They started to feel like people to me.”

Shelter centers on Kyung, a young father who cannot seem to capitalize on any aspect of his life or on the advantages that his Korean

Shelter: A Novel (Picador, 2016)

By Jung Yun, assistant professor of English

2 2 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

parents afforded him growing up. Living with a distinct sense of responsibility for one’s immigrant parents’ sacrifice is familiar to Ms. Yun, who immigrated to Fargo, N.D., from Korea at age 4 with her mother and sister (to join her father who had come a year prior), but her character struggles with a host of other challenges.

Kyung’s parents—the victims of a grisly crime— came with nothing

Jung Yun

and quickly rose up the economic and social ladder; Kyung can’t seem to escape their shadow or to even know what he would do if he did escape. That alienation manifests itself in his inability to succeed at work, in his marriage and as a father. He is further doomed by having grown up without role models of good parenting.

“It makes for pretty good fiction,” Ms. Yun says of the psychological confusion and desperation in Shelter. The fiction, however, was rooted in fact. Living in Massachusetts in 2007, she was struck by a tragic home invasion in Cheshire, Conn., during which a mother and her two daughters were raped and murdered, while the father survived.

“I became very obsessive about that particular case. It was quite terrible,” Ms. Yun says. “I didn’t understand that kind of violence and personal tragedy. The idea of the father surviving this horrific crime and moving on with his life, I didn’t get how anyone could do that.” That final question, she adds, “was the thread that pulled together all of these random paragraphs” that she’d written several years earlier.

Without spoiling the novel’s ending, Ms. Yun leads her characters to a place that felt organic for them. “It was the best possible version of events that could have happened to this particular family,” she says, noting it came together more quickly than the beginning or middle of the novel. “At the end, it felt like I was translating,” she says.

Ms. Yun writes first thing in the morning, before going to campus to teach. (She finds writing like going to the gym; if she puts it off to the end of the day, it doesn’t end up happening.) And, after, she’s able to switch off that mental focus. Stepping away from her dark and difficult subjects is important. “If my brain were constantly humming with the things that I think about and explore in my fiction, that wouldn’t make for a particularly happy life,” she says.

As she begins her next writing project, Ms. Yun hopes to avoid recharting the same territory, but she’s also not going completely afield. “I know what my interests are, and those themes are likely to be present in my writing throughout my career,” she says.

“Fortunately, there are infinite ways of combining those interests into new stories and characters.”

At GW, Ms. Yun tells her students that writers need to find their own stories and then disappear into their work.

“We’re creators, not puppeteers,” she says. “No one should see our strings.”

Y U N : L O G A N W E R L I N G E R / B O O K C O V E R : W I L L I A M AT K I N S

GW NEWS

My Elizabeth (Glitterati, 2016)

By Firooz Zahedi, BA ’76

In this coffee table book, the photographer shares candid images from his 35-year friendship with Elizabeth Taylor—backstage on Broadway, globetrotting, making lunch at home—who he met in the ’70s, when she dated his cousin, the Iranian ambassador to the U.S. In the book, Mr. Zahedi recalls a Corcoran professor holding up a Washington Post photo of Mr. Zahedi playing hooky to take Ms. Taylor to the National Gallery. “Having fun, are we?” he asked.

Pillar of Fire: A Biography of Stephen S. Wise (Texas Tech University Press, 2015)

By A. James Rudin, BA ’55

Rabbi Rudin admits some may see “chutzpah” in his referring to Stephen Wise, a renowned Reform rabbi, by first name, but biographers come to “live” with their subjects over many years.

The late Dr. Wise (1874-1949) still haunted the rabbinical school Rabbi Rudin attended beginning in 1955. “His spirit permeated the school,” he writes. An ardent Zionist and friend to several presidents, Dr. Wise became so well known that the U.S. Postal Service delivered letters to him that were addressed simply to “Rabbi USA.”

China’s Future (Polity Press, 2016)

By David Shambaugh, BA ’78, professor of political science and international affairs

“This is a relatively short book about a Big Topic,” Dr. Shambaugh begins the preface. To date, he notes, only democratic countries have ever developed modern economies. As China aims to get there another way, will its authoritarian government survive in tact or collapse trying? Or will the nation bend to meet the economic goal?

Dr. Shambaugh unpacks these possible futures—“one of the key global uncertainties,” he writes—which promise to reverberate for decades.

Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security (Oxford University Press, 2016)

By Matthew Dallek, associate professor of political management

Today, it’s hard to go through a U.S. airport without thinking about the Department of Homeland Security. This book transports readers back to the infancy of the department’s predecessor, the Office of Civilian Defense. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his famous “date which will live in infamy” speech, following the Pearl Harbor attacks, his wife was assistant director of the OCD. Eleanor Roosevelt, and the OCD director, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, often fought about the office’s mandate.

Both were forced to resign, and the office eventually shuttered but paved the way for the DHS.

A L L C O V E R S : W I L L I A M AT K I N S

Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin (LSU Press, 2016)

By Marlene Trestman, JD ’81

Bessie Margolin (1909-96) was almost as unlikely as a unicorn.

She grew up in an orphanage and went on to become a Jewish attorney in the South, which was known for neither an abundance of women nor Jewish lawyers, let alone both. Ms. Margolin would argue many cases before the Supreme Court, and she had a hand in everything from the Nuremberg tribunals for Nazi war crimes to child labor and minimum wage laws to equalpay employment laws. This book rescues its subject, a friend and mentor of the author’s, from “undeserved obscurity.”

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 2 3

GW NEWS

SPORTS

New men’s tennis coach David Macpherson

2 4 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

[tennis]

Courting a Pro New men’s tennis coach David Macpherson coached an American doubles team to 15 Grand Slam titles and an Olympic gold medal. // By Marcus Helton After more than 30 years spent playing and coaching tennis professionally, David “Macca” Macpherson was ready for a change.

So when the GW men’s tennis head coaching job opened up last summer, he seized the opportunity.

“I just reached a point in my life where I just wanted to branch into something different—something new,” says the 49-yearold Mr. Macpherson, who was hired in August. “I have a lot of close friends in the D.C. area, so it’s somewhere that I’ve always wanted to possibly live. I had a meeting with [Athletic Director Patrick Nero] and [Assistant Athletic Director Nicole Early] and just really kind of fell in love with the program and the school.”

Mr. Macpherson, a Tasmania, Australia, native, spent the past 11 years as coach of the standout American doubles tandem of

continue coaching high-level players, and to be able to enjoy more time at home with his family.”

In an interview with Tennis Now, Bob Bryan described Mr. Macpherson as still the brothers’ “loyal friend” and said there’s “no one better,” while Mike Bryan said Mr. Macpherson was a “very calming influence” on them.

Mr. Macpherson also coached stars Roger Federer and Stanislas Wawrinka to the 2014 Davis Cup title and he was named World Team Tennis Coach of the Year.

As a professional doubles player from 1985 to 2003, the left-handed Mr. Macpherson collected 288 career victories and 16 Association of Tennis Professionals tour titles, getting ranked as high as 11th. He finished with more than $1.7 million in career earnings.

“I couldn’t have been any happier with the young men that I got to come in and work with right away. We hit it off, we’ve bonded, and I know them all so well now after six or seven months with them.”

Bob and Mike Bryan. He helped the Bryan brothers, who are identical twins, to an Olympic gold medal in 2012 in London, 15 Grand Slam championships and 87 career titles. The brothers—who, at 38, are retiring from Davis Cup competition after 14 years of representing the United States—finished ranked No. 1 in the world 10 times.

“As tough as it is to part ways, it is also an exciting time for him,” the Bryan brothers wrote on their Facebook page in August. “… It is a great opportunity for Macca to

“When you’re young, your dreams are of being a player,” Mr. Macpherson says. “I played to the best of my ability until I was about 35 and had sort of a decent career in doubles but never reached the heights that I would have liked, but I had a good career as a player.”

Two years after retiring as a player, he turned to coaching, hooking up with the Bryan brothers. Mr. Macpherson knew them from his playing days, facing the brothers four times during his career. The trio already

had a rapport by the time they became teammates on the Kansas City Explorers, a World Team Tennis league team, in July 2005. That, Mr. Macpherson says, is when the idea of him coaching the Bryan brothers first came about.

“I realized that maybe coaching was my better calling than playing,” Mr. Macpherson says. “[The Bryan brothers] were incredible people to be associated with, and I learned a lot from them and hopefully they learned a little from me.”

Now, Mr. Macpherson is passing along that knowledge to a new group of players as he takes over a program that has won three straight Atlantic 10 championships and five of the last six. His players are intrigued by his pro pedigree.

“That’s OK that he never coached a college team,” says senior Julius Tverijonas, GW’s top singles player. “Of course, it’s different than coaching a few professional players, because he has to manage the student-athletes and a big team of people, so that’s way different.”

Mr. Tverijonas is a 6-foot-1 Lithuanian and two-time first-team all-conference selection. This season, he’s been ranked as high as 118th by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association. Last year, he went 1812 in singles, and while playing all but one match at No. 1 doubles, he went 22-6 with partner Danil Zelenkov, who graduated.

This season, the Colonials also return juniors Chris Reynolds and Chris Fletcher, both of whom were All-A-10 performers in 2015-16. Mr. Reynolds went 20-9 in singles last year to lead the team in wins.

Indeed, coaching at the college level has presented a new set of challenges for Mr. Macpherson—academics and recruiting aren’t considerations on the pro circuit—but he says his players have helped to ease the transition.

“It’s an evolving process—just incremental improvement for each player and then bonding as a team,” Mr. Macpherson says. “But I think we’re off to a really, really strong start, and we have a great nucleus.”

But Mr. Macpherson isn’t totally out of the pro game. He’s tutoring American pro John Isner—famous for playing the longest match in pro history, an 11-hour, 5-minute win over Frenchman Nicolas Mahut at Wimbledon in 2010—on the side, even accompanying Mr. Isner to the Australian Open in January. g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 2 5

GW NEWS

[swimming & diving]

It Went Swimmingly GW wins its first A-10 championship in program history In February, the GW men’s swimming and diving team won its first Atlantic 10 championship in program history—the A-10 has sponsored swimming since the 1978-79 season—besting seven teams and amassing 562.5 points during the four-day meet. La Salle finished second with 528 points.

The senior from Cuveglio, Italy, won seven gold medals—three individual and four relay— and set two conference records* en route to earning his second straight invitation to the NCAA championships. It’s also his second straight MOP honor, becoming the first GW swimmer to win back-to-back MOPs since David Zenk in 2008 and 2009.

100-YARD BUTTERFLY

46.91 SECONDS*

MOST OUTSTANDING ROOKIE PERFORMER: MORITZ FATH The freshman from Haslach, Germany, won two gold medals and became the first GW swimmer to be named MORP since 2006 when David Zenk won that and Most Outstanding Performer.

200-YARD FREESTYLE

1:37.35

Junior Gustav Hokfelt won the 200yard backstroke and set an A-10 record with a time of 1:42.70. He also won the 100-yard backstroke with another A-10 record time of 46.94.

Junior Adam Drury won the 100-yard freestyle and set a GW record with a time of 44.34.

The team of Mr. Hokfelt, Mr. Bolognesi, Mr. Drury and sophomore Alex Auster won the 200-yard freestyle relay and set a GW record with a time of 1:20.19.

The team of Mr. Hokfelt, Mr. Bolognesi, freshman Emils Pone and Mr. Auster won the 200-yard medley relay and set an A-10 record with a time of 1:27.53.

The team of Mr. Drury, freshman Max Forstenhaeusler, Mr. Bolognesi and Mr. Hokfelt won the 400-yard freestyle relay and set a GW record with a time of 2:58.72.

The team of Mr. Hokfelt, Mr. Bolognesi, senior Ben Fitch and Mr. Forstenhaeusler won the 400-yard medley relay and set a GW record with a time of 3:13.63.

500-YARD FREESTYLE

4:25.01

100-YARD BREASTSTROKE

52:24

200-YARD BREASTROKE

1 MINUTE, 57.59 SECONDS

200-YARD FREESTYLE RELAY

1:20.19

200-YARD MEDLEY RELAY

1:27.53*

400-YARD FREESTYLE RELAY

2:58.72

COACH OF THE YEAR: JAMES WINCHESTER The second-year coach and twotime NCAA Assistant of the Year honorable mention is the first GW coach since 2011 (and third ever) to be named the A-10’s top coach.

400-YARD MEDLEY RELAY

3:13.63

Moritz Fath

2 6 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

Adam Drury

AT H L E T I C S C O M M U N I C AT I O N S

MOST OUTSTANDING PERFORMER: ANDREA BOLOGNESI

OTHER GW GOLD MEDALISTS

[cross country]

A Q&A with Miranda DiBiasio The cross country and track star is a three-time all-conference selection and among the best women’s distance runners in GW history.

GW junior women’s distance runner Miranda DiBiasio was drawn to D.C. from the suburbs of Cleveland three years ago by her older sister Olivia, who is a senior at American University, where she also runs track.

Since then, Miranda has become one of the Atlantic 10’s top runners—she’s a three-time all-conference pick—while setting three GW records en route to becoming one of the best women’s distance runners in the program’s six-year history. This winter, Ms. DiBiasio chatted with GW Magazine about her career and future plans.

AT H L E T I C S C O M M U N I C AT I O N S

What appealed to you about GW and D.C.?

I knew that I wanted to go away from home—I wanted to get out of Ohio and change things up a little bit—and I was a little hesitant about going in a different direction from [Olivia] because I wanted to stay relatively close to somebody. I’ve always been somebody who really likes the city; I’m not somebody who’s very fond of rural areas.

So I was attracted to D.C. because it had that city lifestyle but also because my sister was here.

How long have you been running competitively and what got you into the sport?

Since about seventh grade. I played other sports throughout elementary and middle school but I kind of found my niche in distance running through those sports.

Everything seemed to be difficult for me except for the running, so this is what came naturally to me and I kind of stuck with it.

What do you want to be when you grow up? Any post-graduation plans?

Now that I’m a little bit older—and really since my time here in college—I think I’ve kind of gotten into a groove where I know what I need to do to find success, because what I’ve been doing has been working”

Miranda DiBiasio

I think part of what really attracted me to the [exercise science] major is I’ve always been involved in some kind of sport my entire life. So the human body has always been fascinating to me; going through injuries and prevention and stuff, and the fact that there’s so many things we don’t know about how our bodies work and we use them on a daily basis.

So my goal with my degree is I would love to be able to work one-on-one with clients, doing both exercise and nutrition planning, because the nutrition aspect of sports and activity is something that I find really, really fascinating as well.

How much do you tinker with your workout routine?

Now that I’m a little bit older—and really since my time here in college—I think I’ve kind of gotten into a groove where I know what I need to do to find success, because what I’ve been doing has been working. But I would say that all throughout high school and at the beginning of my college career, it took some time.

It took some trial runs with different things and what kind of stuff I needed to do to really keep myself healthy, and also just with furthering my own education about the importance of certain nutritional aspects and preventive training and sleep—it all kind of ties together. It’s always kind of a work in progress.

What do you do when you’re not running long distances?

[Laughs] It’s so sad that it seems like that’s such a tough question. I really love to spend time with family and friends. Sometimes there’s really nothing better than just, like, curling up in a ball with some of my best friends and just watching a movie or just doing something very low-key and relaxing. I think I sometimes have a little bit of trouble getting myself to actually relax—I’m a very high-strung person—so having that time that really forces me to unwind is really nice.

—Marcus Helton g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 2 7

A

Line by Line Perspective Sometimes things don’t work out. Colombian-born Corcoran professor Juana Medina knows this as well as anyone. But the children’s book illustrator and author also knows that sometimes they do, and that’s enough to keep her cheery in the face of gloom.

Story

2 8 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

Matthew Stoss

JUANA MEDINA

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 2 9

“I think we’re completely doomed!”

The 36-year-old adjunct professor at the Corcoran School for the Arts and Design (she mostly teaches animation) has been politely accused of excessive cheer. Now, to prove that she’s not just all free cake and rescue puppies, she’s veered into a dire aside on how we’re not doing enough to stop climate change.

Ms. Medina says that if we don’t watch it, we’re all going to be broiled in our own atmosphere and die with warm, pink centers on the blanched hellscape of what used to be a really nice place.

She also doesn’t care for 3 0 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

printers or traffic jams.

“They drive me absolutely crazy,” she says.

The point the Colombian-born Ms. Medina is making—other than that we should heed the climatologists’ augurs of calamity—is that things can and do bug her. She admits that her disposition does lean sunny, but it’s not because of some smiling-blind Panglossian optimism. It’s a choice based on life experiences that cover every extreme, and those experiences have afforded her that which is so elusive for so many people: perspective.

“I think about days where I remember being paged at the hospital, where I was an intern, saying, ‘There’s a bomb threat. Leave your patients. Go out the door,’ and feeling like there’s no way I’m going to leave this cancer survivor alone in her wheelchair and

go, ‘Um, bye, I hope there’s not a bomb,’” Ms. Medina says. “I guess I won’t lose my mind over this printer.”

Today, Ms. Medina is an increasingly acclaimed children’s book illustrator and author. Her work has been celebrated, notably, by The New York Times and The Washington Post, and she’s collaborated with U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, while winning the top award in children’s literature for Latino and Latina authors.

She has a nice life with her partner, George Mason University poetry professor Sally Keith, in Northwest D.C., where the couple is raising adopted twin boys, Agustin and Julian.

But in 2002, Ms. Medina was a 22-yearold immigrant physical therapist, embarking on what would become a 10-year, $40,000 fight for permanent U.S. residency after civil war, economic instability and intolerance pushed her away from her beloved Colombia.

The way Ms. Medina tells that part of her

JUANA MEDINA

Juana Medina thinks we’re completely doomed.

JUANA & LUC AS COV ER : COUR TE SY C ANDLE W ICK PRE S S

story, it all sounds pretty immiserating. Her father died in an accidental fire when she was an infant. She came of age around the time authorities killed billionaire drug lord Pablo Escobar. Insurrectionists kidnapped her congresswoman aunt for seven years.

Her step-cousin survived a bombing of her apartment complex only because she wasn’t home for the explosion. War, in concert with the drug cartels, helped drive her stepfather’s medical supply company out of business and hastened her and her family’s emigration.

A lot of it is objectively awful—she says she saw dead bodies and that she still has nightmares—but, she insists, not all of it was. Or even most of it. Not for her. Not, she knows, compared to other Colombian children. Ms. Medina had a large, loving family, anchored by her mother and grandparents. Her grandfather was a wellto-do neurosurgeon and her grandmother, a woodworker, built some of her husband’s medical supplies. The family had the means to send Ms. Medina to a private school, where she learned English, and to take her on trips to the United States.

“I was a lucky child,” Ms. Medina says. “I grew up in a family that was very optimistic and giving, and I think I was shielded from many things.”

There’s been a misunderstanding.

Quintessential Juana is not excessive cheer; it’s pragmatic cheer. Her life is complicated and sometimes contradictory—she left Colombia, yet adores it—but it left her with a nuanced perspective that’s informed as much by empathy as reason. It’s become the fount of her optimism, preserving her and fueling the happy daydream fancy of her art.

The approach doesn’t work for everything—existential threats to the planet, for example—but it’s not bad when confronted with low toner, a thousand idiots baffled by the alternate merge or some philistine who insists: I could draw that.

Simple-looking art is counterintuitive. It looks easy, but making it look easy is actually really hard.

“I think the one I get the most is, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s going to take you two minutes to do. What’s so hard about three traces that you do in 10 seconds?’” Ms. Medina says.

“The truth is it has taken me 30-something years of training to get to do it in 10 seconds.”

Ms. Medina draws daily and has since elementary school, when she doodled on paper and other less-authorized surfaces, caricaturing life and especially her teachers.

She describes her routine as “relentless” and the reason she can distill a form or action to its essence with a couple of wrist-flick strokes and a splotch of watercolor.

Her lines are clean, confident and stutterfree. They’re inky streamlets that ebb and bloat with a tilt of her pen, and after so much drawing, she often skips penciling and goes brazenly for ink.

“Her line doesn’t look like somebody else’s line,” says Hilary Price, who created the comic strip Rhymes with Orange and with whom Ms. Medina interned while in art school. “It doesn’t look like, ‘Oh, this reminds me of this other artist.’ So what I feel like I respond to … is a sense of authenticity.”

Of the seven elements of art—color, form, line, shape, space, texture and value—line might be the most personal. It has a lot in common with a fingerprint. Certainly there are those rare artist chameleons who can pass off alien styles, but everyone has the expressional equivalent of a standing heart rate.

“Drawing is such an immediate act,” says Renée Foulks, the drawing department chair at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the oldest art school in the United States. “You’re not mixing color; you’re picking up a piece of charcoal or graphite pencil and you’re making a mark. It’s going right from your brain, through your emotional core, right through your hand, and boom, it’s there.

“In that immediacy, there’s a great deal about [an artist’s] emotional state, their concerns, their loves, their joys, their anger.”

The ease and air of Ms. Medina’s unforgiving style—using fewer lines, the power of which is predicated on fluidity, makes it hard to hide mistakes and underscores just how much work it takes to maintain the illusion of ease—comes from a lot of places, some more tangible than others.

Ms. Medina struggles to explain why she

Juana Medina’s awardwinning autobiographical early chapter book, Juana & Lucas

draws the way she does, saying, “It’s just the way it comes out,” and comparing it to a spider walking in ink. But she cites Argentine cartoonist Quino, Dutch illustrator Dick Bruna, the late New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg and the 19th-century French painter and caricaturist Honoré Daumier among her influences.

The breeze of Ms. Medina’s line and her lighthearted, absurdist humor are what appealed to Ms. Medina’s editor at Candlewick Press, Mary Lee Donovan.

A major children’s publishing house and the home of two-time Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo, Candlewick put out the second and most acclaimed of Ms. Medina’s three outings as an author-illustrator, Juana & Lucas, in September 2016. Viking Press published her two other solo efforts: 1 Big Salad: A Delicious Counting Book and ABC Pasta: An Entertaining Alphabet.

“I never cease to be amazed by artists who, with just these simple gestural drawings, can capture so much emotion, expression and personality,” Ms. Donovan says. “Cleary, Juana is a master at that.”

There is a Colombia that exists outside Pablo Escobar biopics, mafia films and narco TV series and it follows Juana Medina like a happy shadow. It’s the Colombia that she grew up in, smelling fresh fruit and tropical rain, visiting her grandfather’s library, hearing Spanish everywhere and playing fútbol around Bogotá, a city of 8 million tucked in a green crook of the Andes mountains.

“That’s exactly why I wanted the book in Colombia: to show a different reality about the country,” Ms. Medina says.

This is the Colombia of Juana & Lucas, Ms. Medina’s 88-page autobiographical early chapter book and love letter to her home and childhood. It’s illustrated in ink and watercolor and written in bluntly funny and heartfelt prose filled with similes—“She’s frowning like a hippo just sat on her toes.”—that read like Raymond Chandler in Wonderland.

The wistful story follows a little girl named Juana, her day-to-day life in Bogotá and her amusing, everyman struggle to learn English in preparation for a trip with her grandparents to a fictional amusement park, a Disney World stand-in called “Spaceland.”

Lucas is her dog and best friend.

The New York Times described Juana & Lucas as a “giant hug,” and the book won the 2017 Pura Belpré Award. Established in 1996, the honor goes to the Latino or Latina author and illustrator whose work best “celebrates the Latino cultural experience” in children’s g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 3 1

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I L L U S T R AT I O N : J U A N A M E D I N A / I L L U S T R AT I O N P H O T O : W I L L I A M AT K I N S

“Her line doesn’t look like somebody else’s line. It doesn’t look like, ‘Oh, this reminds me of this other artist.’ So what I feel like I respond to ... is a sense of authenticity.”

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 3 3

I L L U S T R AT I O N : J U A N A M E D I N A

M E D I N A : W I L L I A M AT K I N S / I L L U S T R AT I O N P H O T O : J U A N A M E D I N A

literature. There are two sequels planned to Juana & Lucas, the first of which is scheduled for a 2019 release.

Colombia is integral to the plot and the success of Juana & Lucas, which Candlewick editorial director Mary Lee Donovan describes as a steady seller relative to its niche, which many publishers questioned. Most insisted that Ms. Medina shift the setting to a more familiar and demographically (also financially) ecumenical setting like a U.S. immigrant neighborhood or even Mexico, because the main character, a plump, pigtailed girl who loves sports and detests skirts, would look “so cute” in a big sombrero.

Ms. Medina rebuffed them. Ms. Donovan and Candlewick never asked.

“So much of her story is about where she lives and particularly her life,” Ms. Donovan says. “It seems like it would just be flattening her story, trying to take her out of the environment that has helped shape who she is.”

A part of that involved learning English.

The experience became the plot of Juana & Lucas and even gave Ms. Medina greater depth and verisimilitude as a children’s writer.

“There’s something about the combination of being a child,” Ms. Donovan says, “and using a second language to try to describe some of those things. There’s just something quintessentially childlike about that. A child doesn’t always know the proper terminology or the dictionary word to describe something, so they have to use a lot of other words to convey that because they don’t have that toolbox.”

Ms. Medina’s move into the children’s book industry was gradual and largely dictated by the constraints of a life lived immigration lawyer to immigration lawyer and visa to visa. The frustrating, expensive, heartbreaking and onerous odyssey is detailed in Ms. Medina’s March 2016 Fusion.net graphic essay “I Juana Live in America.”

When she got to the United States in 2002 at age 22 to be with her family, which had established itself with the help of a relative who owned a trucking business, Ms. Medina planned to continue in physical therapy. But, she says, her Colombian alma mater refused to mail her transcripts, insisting instead she retrieve them in person. This, obviously, would be impossible. She abandoned that career path and took some classes for fun at Georgetown University, where a professor encouraged her to pursue a formal art education.

Ms. Medina started at the Corcoran before transferring to the Rhode Island School of Design, where she found a home and started to believe she could turn art into a living.

RISD, she says, was a humbling experience. The other undergrad students— all of whom were years younger than her, not to mention from another world—seemed so much more advanced. They awed her.

The assignments awed her. Among the earliest she remembers is having to draw 500 thumbnails of some boring everyday object like a screw or a nail. The directions: “Explore” the thing through “contrast.”

“I had never taken myself seriously when it came to art,” Ms. Medina says. “That level of discipline made me take it very serious. …

There was a solemnity about it.”

Ms. Medina graduated from RISD in 2010 at age 29 with a BFA in graphic design, covering tuition with mini scholarships, including one from the National Cartoonists

left

Juana Medina at work in her studio in Northwest D.C.

Society, and working part-time in the school’s student affairs office.

She also supplemented her income with international freelance illustration jobs, starting in 2007. Her step-cousin, the one who years earlier survived the apartment bombing, was in the Colombian publishing industry and acted as a quasi-agent. The work had to come from abroad because Ms. Medina’s student visa forbade her from working anywhere off RISD’s campus in the United States.

Ms. Medina’s first paid art gig in the U.S. was an internship with Rhymes with Orange writer/illustrator Hilary Price. They met at a National Cartoonists Society conference in New Orleans, where Ms. Medina received her cartooning scholarship.

“She was showing me some of her thesis project,” Ms. Price says, “and I mean it was really clear that she was really, really good at using the simplest lines with such vitality to create these wonderful cartoons and these wonderful stories. So when she told me that she was looking around for an internship, I was like, ‘Oh my god, yes. I’ve never done this before but, absolutely, I want to spend time with you and get access to your creativity.’”

The two bonded over time spent in Ms. Price’s converted toothbrush factory studio in Somerville, Mass. They remain good friends, and Ms. Price—who has art

by Ms. Medina hanging in her dining room and guest bedroom—later tried to help Ms. Medina get permanent U.S. residency by getting the Cartoonists Society to vouch for her in a letter.

In December 2012, Ms. Medina, after paying her lawyer in installments to mitigate the untenably high cost of a citizenship battle, beat back the forces of darkest bureaucracy to win her green card.

“Sometimes I feel: Was I crazy?”

Ms. Medina says. “Why did I want to stay that badly? And the reality is, being Colombian and being gay, there were so many things that just made me feel like, ‘Forget it, I have to try. I really have to see how it goes,’ because I really didn’t feel like I could make my life in Colombia the way I could make it here.”

Ms. Medina credits that excessive/ pragmatic cheer she’s accused of having as her “mechanism of self-preservation.” It’s kept her going and kept Colombia, despite the problems that forced her to leave, a wellloved and well-missed place. And when there are blips of doom—printers, traffic, the end of the world—the perspective she’s gleaned from life kicks in.

“Isn’t there enough gloom already in the world?” she says. g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 3 5

THE AUTISM SEX BIAS 3 6 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

Boys are diagnosed with autism at more than four times the rate of girls.

Scientists are trying to figure out why, but this much is becoming clear: All that we think we know about autism is only half the story.

I L L U S T R AT I O N : J O H N M C G L A S S O N

STORY BY

Kristen Mitchell

hen Frances was born, she was an undersized but easy baby—healthy, happy, social.

As she got older, she was slow to roll over, to crawl and to take her first steps. She didn’t always respond to her name. And while she could seem somewhat disinterested in the people around her, she was consumed with Henry the octopus from the kids show The Wiggles.

And it was a stuffed Henry toy that finally, at age 3½, coaxed out her first word—a full phrase, actually: Frances had excitedly just opened the gift when her mom teasingly claimed the doll as her own. Frances screamed: “Henry! That’s my Henry.”

Her father, Kevin Pelphrey, was a recently minted PhD in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, working as a postdoc studying cognitive neuroscience at Duke. He’d often discussed his daughter and her struggles with his

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 3 7

‘SHE’LL GROW OUT OF IT' Kevin Pelphrey

3 8 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

W I L L I A M AT K I N S

I HAD A DEGREE IN CHILD PSYCHOLOGY, AND I WAS WILLING TO ACCEPT THE ANSWER,

co-workers, a group that included autism researchers, but the possibility of autism never surfaced.

It also never came up with any of the multiple specialists he took Frances to see.

Frances’ development was slightly delayed, he was told, but she would catch up.

Then when Frances was 4 years old, a psychologist for the first time suggested autism as an explanation.

“I had a degree in child psychology, and I was willing to accept the answer, ‘She’ll grow out of it,’ because I liked hearing that,” Dr. Pelphrey says.

But fathers can be forgiven a little wishful denial. And physicians are reminded over and over in their training that when they hear hoofbeats, look for a horse not a zebra— that an ailment is likely the garden-variety thing, not the exotic exception. A girl with autism was a zebra.

Today, boys in the U.S. are affected at four-and-a-half times the rate of girls: 1 in 42 versus 1 in 189, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As a result, for decades it’s been the boys with autism who overwhelmingly are the ones enrolled in studies, and it’s boys for whom treatments and interventions are designed.

Now researchers are realizing that the textbook definition of autism—the repetitive behaviors, impaired communication and social interactions—might pertain only to boys, too.

Shortly after the suggestion that Frances may have autism, Dr. Pelphrey took her for a day of testing at Yale University’s Child Study Center. After evaluations by a psychologist, a social worker and a speech pathologist, she was officially diagnosed with autism.

The mysteries surrounding her condition and the meandering path to a diagnosis eventually would become the driving force of Dr. Pelphrey’s career.

He was studying the human brain and how it comprehends other humans, but “never really cared about its application. It was just knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” he said in an emotional speech at GW in October, eyes red with stifled tears. “[I]t was my daughter Frances that shaped my career into something that’s been incredibly, incredibly valuable for me.”

Dr. Pelphrey became a professor at the Yale Child Study Center, where Frances

was diagnosed, and the founding director of a center for developmental neuroscience at Yale. Then last year, he came to GW to launch its Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Institute and to fill a new endowed professorship (the Carbonell Family Professor in Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders), bringing along $20 million in grants, including a $15 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to mine the conundrum of girls with autism.

“He’s now really known as the go-to person in the field,” says Lisa Gilotty, a program chief at the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health who oversees autism research, including Dr. Pelphrey’s grant.

His unprecedented explorations into the brains of kids with autism now lead him to believe that the boy-to-girl ratio is probably more like 2 to 1, instead of 4.5 to 1, and that what we think we know about autism is certainly only half the story. The differences in autism between the sexes, he says, is “actually very fundamental to what autism is.”

FRANCES PELPHREY IS NOW 13 and, in a lot of

ways, is a typical middle-schooler. She’s in love with Zac Efron, she likes her music loud and she’s inseparable from her phone.

Dr. Pelphrey has said that 10 years earlier, when doctors were stymied by her symptoms and inclined to wait it out, they would have been more proactive were she a boy. The problem is that time in those first years is crucial.

His son Lowell, the youngest of three biological kids (he and his wife, Annie, have five children altogether), was 1½ when he came to the attention of doctors. He was about to participate in a control group made up of the typically developing siblings of children with autism when Yale researchers discovered Lowell wasn’t making appropriate eye contact for his age. He was diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified, or PDDNOS, a gray area under the autism umbrella in which a person typically has social or communication impairments but not all of the features of the more defined subgroups.

He began an intense weekly regimen of 32 hours of behavioral therapy and after four years, Lowell, now 8, was no longer considered to be on the autism spectrum,

although he does tend to shy from social interactions, Dr. Pelphrey says, and to speak in a “direct and precise,” almost scholarly cadence.

Coming off the spectrum is rare, but studies have shown that an early jump on therapy can give kids with ASD critical developmental and social boosts, and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends screening children as early as 18 months old in order to get them into the treatment pipeline.

But girls, historically, have not had the benefit of that early and often life-changing intervention because their symptoms go overlooked.

Girls with ASD tend to have better social skills and often are less disruptive than boys with ASD, and even their typically developing male peers, Dr. Pelphrey says.

Frances, for instance, has always sustained good eye contact, while difficulty with that is considered one of the hallmark red flags of ASD. Instead, he says, for Frances and some other girls with autism, difficulty regulating emotions is more of a distinguishing feature.

Obsessive lining up or ordering of objects is common, too, but may be more apparent in boys because of the inanimate objects, like cars and trains, that a boy might be more prone to play with, Dr. Pelphrey says.

“If a girl is more likely to be interested in dolls and is lining up dolls, it looks more typical because she’s lining up social objects when really she is just lining them up like they’re dominos,” he says.

The issue of girls with autism being underidentified by doctors and teachers and little-understood by researchers became a self-perpetuating cycle.

Donna Werling, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California-San Francisco, worked in Dr. Pelphrey’s Yale lab a decade ago as an undergraduate. “At that time, everyone would report there was a sex bias in autism diagnosis,” she says, “but they would go on to use that as an excuse not to include girls.”

Today Dr. Werling studies how typically developing boys and girls are different on a genetic level, and how those differences relate to autism. The underdiagnosis of girls makes her work difficult.

“Inherently, the work that we’re doing is challenged by the fact that the samples we have available to us are more biased toward boys than they should be,” she says.

“Hopefully, time will fix that.”

Funding for studies focused on sex and gender differences in people with autism is on the rise. In 2015, some of the top organizations funding autism research designated more than $6.4 million for 11 projects on sex differences, compared to slightly more than $300,000 on two projects in 2008, according to an analysis

by Spectrum, an autism news site that is an editorially independent wing of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative.

Dr. Pelphrey predicts it will take at least another decade for the information about girls with ASD to match the mass of information available about boys with ASD. Part of the obstacle in gathering that has been the way autism is diagnosed. Most children with autism are diagnosed through observation and an intensive, hourslong oral exam with their parents, who are questioned about their child’s behavior. Answers are scored on a scale and plugged into a formula to determine where on the spectrum a child might be.

The infinitely individualized nature of autism has so far eluded any singular biological signature—a gene, a chemical disruptor, a brain wave—that can be screened for. Instead there’s a growing list of promising biomarkers, each indicative of some piece of the autism equation, for some people with autism.

It’s an effort to understand autism from the inside out, and the intellectual abyss of the brain and genetics offers an opportunity for scientists of just about any stripe to bring their chops. There is no scientifically

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 3 9

agreed-upon cause of autism, and people on the spectrum range from those with severe language and mental impairments to those who live and thrive independently.

Dr. Pelphrey got involved as a side project while he was a postdoc at UNC; he was working in developmental psychology, building a wearable camera for infants that would track the direction of their gaze.

A mentor, UNC professor Joe Piven, who heads the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities, suggested he use the tool to study people with autism.

The result, in 2002, was the first study— albeit a very small one—to compare the eye movements of five adult males with autism and five without as they looked at a photo of another person’s face, which has been cited 900 times in the years since.

While the path of movement for the control group generally formed a triangle across the eyes, nose and mouth, the eyes of the group with autism tended to roam lessrevealing facial features, like an ear or chin, Dr. Pelphrey and his colleagues wrote. The findings, they said, could point to a reason why people with autism experience difficulty with facial perception and with reading a person’s affect, or it may be the result of a broader information-processing issue.

Dr. Pelphrey was still primarily interested, though, in more broadly understanding the so-called “social brain,” the parts that process things like facial expressions, posture, movement—the nonverbal signaling we absorb and use to make sense of other people.

Occasionally that veered into autism research over the years, including, in a big way, in 2010. Dr. Pelphrey and a team from Yale compared the brain activity of kids and teens with autism with that of their unaffected siblings and of typically developing kids as each group watched a video of familiar human movement, like someone playing pat-a-cake.

They found brain regions where there was reduced activity only in the autism group, and they found areas of the brain where both the autism group and their unaffected siblings had reduced activity—indicative, they suggested, of some shared genetic risk for neurodevelopmental disorders.

But most intriguing: Only among the unaffected siblings, they also found

4 0 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

By The Numbers Some top funders of autism research, including the NIH and Autism Speaks, in recent years have ramped up their spending for studies exploring sex and gender differences in people with autism, according to an analysis by Spectrum, an autism news site.

2008

$300,000 2 PROJECTS

heightened activity in areas of the brain that aren’t typically involved in processing that kind of visual data. It was almost as if the brains of the unaffected siblings had found an alternate route, compensating for deficits by circumventing them.

“Development is an active process,” Dr. Pelphrey says of the brain, drawing an analogy to rivers carving through a landscape. “It’s not just an unfolding plan; it’s not just the unfolding of a preconceived destiny. And with that, you’ve got the opportunity for flexibility. This one gene is pushing you, but the rest of your body is constantly trying to get back [on track.]”

Exploring this kind of issue through the engines of genetics and brain imaging at once was an intensely powerful tool—one autism researcher, who was not part of the study, told a reporter at the time that using them to reach this finding was “nearly unprecedented.”

The next step for Dr. Pelphrey would be to add people and time. He wants to build a data set that might even be considered, in his words—those of a man who scraps daily with the love, the pain, the elation and the biological wonder of autism—“a national treasure.”

EVENTUALLY, HE HAS SAID, “I would like for

2015

$6.4 million 11 PROJECTS

anyone in the D.C. area who Googles ‘autism’ to see that they have a place to come that has everything they need.”

That place, a 10,000-square-foot clinical center that Dr. Pelphrey’s institute is building at GW’s Virginia Science and Technology Campus in Ashburn, is expected to open in the fall. It will be a place for diagnosis and therapy, with specialists onhand from mental health and medicine to nursing, occupational therapy and speech and hearing sciences, working together, as well as with clinical and research partners from Children’s National Health System.

Also planned are training opportunities for graduate students and undergrads, and a second location in Monroe Hall on the Foggy Bottom Campus.

The idea is to take what’s learned in the lab—from a molecular level on up—and use that to build more targeted autism treatments and interventions for use in the clinic. When one of those works, or doesn’t,

the team will break it down to its molecular level again to figure out why, and then push that knowledge into even-more-tailored treatments and, possibly, translate it outward into efforts to influence public policy.

At the moment, though, it’s the basic science that’s giving the young institute its oomph and confident stride into a competitive field.

“Kevin has always been very innovative,” says Dr. Piven, the mentor from his days at UNC. “He’s not doing the 10th study of some idea, he’s often doing the first study.”

In 2012, Dr. Pelphrey, while still at Yale, was awarded a five-year, $15 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to lead a network of researchers in trying to understand the nature of autism in girls and how it differs from that of boys. It was part of a $100 million assault on autism’s vagaries that year by the NIH, funding nine centers and networks, with Dr. Pelphrey’s the only one exploring sex differences.

Since then, Dr. Pelphrey—along with collaborators at Harvard University, Seattle Children’s Hospital, the University of California-Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, Yale and, now, GW—is building what the team of researchers is calling an unparalleled study sample: 250 girls with autism and 250 boys, 100 each of sisters and brothers of people with autism, and 100 each of typically developing girls and boys, all within the range of 6 to 17 years old.

They’ve been stratified by their observable, behavioral characteristics; they’ve had extensive brain imaging; their genomes are being sequenced and their gene expression—the turning on or off of a gene, and when—is being analyzed.

So far they’ve used that data to generate some 50 peer-reviewed articles, which have been cited nearly 2,000 times. Among them is a 2016 study that found brain imaging can predict which kids with autism will benefit from one of the only evidence-based therapies, called pivotal response treatment.

Another study, published in 2016 by Dr. Pelphrey and others, turned again to brain activity in the regions responsible for processing biological motion. The researchers found that they could look at that brain circuit and predict with 76 percent accuracy who was affected by ASD—but it only worked on the boys. The technique

Boys in the U.S. are affected at four-and-a-half times the rate of girls: 1 in 42 versus 1 in 189, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As a result, for decades it’s been the boys with autism who overwhelmingly are the ones enrolled in studies, and it’s boys for whom treatments and interventions are designed. Now researchers are realizing that the textbook definition of autism—the repetitive behaviors, impaired communication and social interactions— might pertain only to boys, too.

HE WANTS TO BUILD A DATA SET THAT MIGHT EVEN BE CONSIDERED, IN HIS WORDS—THOSE OF A MAN WHO SCRAPS DAILY WITH THE LOVE, THE PAIN, THE ELATION AND THE BIOLOGICAL WONDER OF AUTISM— “A NATIONAL TREASURE.”

could not distinguish a girl with autism from a typically developing girl.

“This was incredibly important for us to understand, because it might be that everything we thought we knew, really, was specific to boys,” Dr. Pelphrey said last year during a public lecture through the Interactive Autism Network.

“We’re doing a great job of characterizing the neurocircuitry that’s disrupted in boys.

Our whole field should be proud of that,” he said. “But we’ve overlooked the girls.”

Still, the findings could have enormous implications for diagnosing boys with autism and getting them earlier access to treatments. It also gets researchers one step deeper into the fog of the girl question.

They’re hunting now for the equivalent biomarkers in girls. But if girls are somehow being shielded, or even compensating for autism’s deficits, the answers stand to benefit both sexes.

Entering the final year of the grant, which Dr. Pelphrey hopes to renew, he’s anxious to begin tracking the study group through the transition into adolescence and adulthood, and to see how the childhood data bears out over time.

Similar to the all-absorbing brains of newborns and toddlers, and the emphasis on early intervention for them, he says, neurologists are finding that adolescence brings a second window of brain plasticity and potential growth. “You’ve got this massive reorganization in the brain as well as this reorganization of societal demands,” Dr. Pelphrey says. “So it’s a time when you can either get worse or be doing better. We’re hoping to understand how that transition happens.”

And whether he’s looking for them or not, similar changes will be underway at home, too, as Frances transitions into adolescence.

Fixations with children’s TV shows have given way to fixations with boys, and requests for him to print out photos of Zac Efron for her. The answer is always no.

But he’s come to appreciate her bare honesty, and that it keeps open a window that might be abruptly shut for other fathers of teenage girls.

“Growing up, my sister never discussed boys with our dad,” Dr. Pelphrey says.

“Frances tells me more than I want to know.

It’s cute.”

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 4 1

at the

ates

Alumna Yvonne Orji is a co-star on HBO’s Insecure and on the verge of breaking through to the big time.

Association Yvonne for Campus Orji might STORY Ruth Steinhardt Activities, a slightly be about to PHOTOS William Atkins circus-like affair break her neck, connecting performers and it will be partly with college activity coordinators GW Magazine’s fault. who might want to book them. Before this The star of HBO’s Insecure is using interview, she delivered a funny, casual talk to a cavernous a photographer’s shoulder as leverage to clamber up a low, hall of enthusiastic college students. Then she spent an hour slippery wall in the Baltimore Convention Center, determined meeting and taking pictures with fans, hugging, laughing and to get the raked angle of an alcove as a photo backdrop. maintaining the same warm older-sisterly ease throughout.

“I have a tendency to art-direct,” says Ms. Orji, BA ’05, She doesn’t seem tired.

MPH ’08. After an outdoor photoshoot proved to be too cold, An observer asks nervously: Is she sure she doesn’t want at she spotted this large trapezoidal niche in the convention least to take her shoes off? It’s a fair question. A less-proficient center’s spacious upper hall—“That’d look cool!”—and now, wearer could sprain an ankle just taking a step in the threeafter animatedly brainstorming angles and poses, she’s ready inch sequined pumps she’s rocking. Proposing to scramble up to go for it. a wall in them, even a low wall, seems like asking for trouble.

Ms. Orji is in Baltimore for a conference by the National g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 4 3

Nope!

“

”

Ms. Orji says cheerfully. She drafts a couple of supporters, braces herself and pushes off.

At the top of her precarious rise she appears suspended, for an instant, in a cinematic freeze-frame: tipped forward, arms outstretched for balance, knees bent, like a leggy Chaplin in heels.

At this moment, Yvonne Orji is on the verge in more than one sense. This convention is taking place on a Monday: On Thursday, she’ll attend the NAACP Image Awards after being nominated for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series. The previous week, she filmed a guest spot on the hit network comedy-drama Jane the Virgin. In between, she gave a TEDx talk in Wilmington, Del., and attended the NBA All-Star Game in New Orleans. There, she recorded a podcast, “Ball Girl Magic,” and, she says, Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant approached her to say he’s a fan of Insecure. (Durant is not the only highprofile viewer, apparently: Ms. Orji posted an Instagram photo of Barack Obama from the White House Christmas Party last year, reporting that he told her and other Insecure cast members that he watched the show, “loved what [they] were doing,” and “H[E]LD OUR HANDS” (capital letters Ms. Orji’s). A few weeks from now, she’ll begin work on the second season of Insecure.

“It’s surreal,” says Ms. Orji, 33. “If I seem chill about it, it’s because I’m grateful and I’m in awe. I believed in this, I prayed for it, I wanted it, but it’s crazy that I’m actually here.”

Her determination to climb the wall, heels and all, is not a bad metaphor for Ms. Orji’s career, in which she’s followed her principles but not always the expected path. After graduating from GW, she turned her back on a medical career to pursue comedy. Now she is the second lead on a hit television show, with an NAACP Image Award nomination and an online comedy pilot of her own under her belt.

And how did she get here? Not without taking a few leaps of faith.

Insecure, which centers on the lives of young black professionals in Los Angeles, is a bona fide hit. It garnered 100 percent positive reviews in its first season, according to media 4 4 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.

Adapted from creator Issa Rae’s web series, Misadventures of an Awkward Black Girl, Insecure arrives at a moment when a number of highly acclaimed and beloved television shows—including network hits Jane the Virgin, Black-ish and Fresh Off the Boat, and cable series Broad City and Atlanta—are exploring stories outside the dominant (white, male) paradigm.

For Ms. Orji, there’s never been a more important time to showcase diverse voices.

“The current climate around immigration and race is instilling this unnecessary fear,” Ms. Orji says. “Media has the power to reinforce and change cultures and minds; that’s what art is supposed to do. You find yourself in and identify with art, regardless of what it looks like. I kind of bristle when people talk about ‘target audiences.’ I understand from a marketing point of view you have to segment your audience.

But I know how many black people watch Seinfeld.”

On Insecure, Ms. Orji plays Molly, a smart, stylish, driven corporate lawyer whose romantic travails seem inversely proportionate to her professional success.

The best friend of Ms. Rae’s eponymous lead character Issa, Molly could, in a less deft show, read as a romantic comedy sidekick cliché: the ambitious career girl who can’t hold down a man.

“In some ways she is that ’90s rom-com role, the best friend who’s perpetually single,” Variety television critic Sonia Saraiya says of Molly. “But she’s also a really wellrounded character. She’s complex. She has issues of her own she’s trying to deal with.”

“Yvonne brings a lot of humor to Molly, and as a character she has that, but she’s also dealing with some stuff that’s very dark and very painful,” says Prentice Penny, executive producer of Insecure. “She doesn’t have ill intentions when she makes these mistakes, but she can’t get out of her own way.”

Of the show’s primary characters, Molly may struggle with the most extreme conflicts between her public and private selves, between her desires and the expectations she’s internalized. She breaks up with a man she likes because he works at a rental car agency and never went to college; she frightens off another by assuming a commitment after three casual dates. Dating, for Molly, is a second job, though the laserfocused intensity that seems to have brought her corporate success doesn’t serve her well when it comes to relationships.

Nor is her professional life uncomplicated.

“She’s like the Will Smith of corporate,” Issa narrates in the pilot episode. “White people lo-o-ove Molly; black people also lo-o-ove Molly.” But that love comes with conditions.

I’m grateful and

I’m in awe.

I believed in this, I prayed for it, I wanted it,

but it’s crazy that

I’m actually here.

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 4 5

In her predominantly white office, Molly has to constantly code-switch, adapting her behavior and her cultural markers to the expectations of her white peers. With her best friend, Molly can be her funny, candid, judgmental self, criticizing or affirming Issa’s decisions, lamenting her own, wearing an old t-shirt and gorging on junk food. But at her firm, where she is the only prominent black presence, she has to be perfectly tailored, flawlessly groomed, and endure her coworkers’ microaggressions with the nonthreatening smile of a happy android.

“I came away from the first season thinking ‘This is a breakout star,’” Ms. Saraiya says of Ms. Orji’s performance.

“Part of what I love about her portrayal of Molly is the way she takes on code-switching, which can feel like a very private and even a shameful process—to admit to the world that you have to adopt different personas in order not to feel oppressed all the time. So to see an actor take that on is impressive.”

In an early episode, Molly tries to tactfully intervene with a gregarious young associate who refuses to downplay her blackness to suit the firm’s buttoned-down atmosphere.

“If you want to be successful here, you gotta know when to switch it up a little bit,” Molly tells her. The associate, understandably, takes offense: “I didn’t ‘switch it up’ when I was named editor of the law review.”

As Molly predicts, however, her white bosses don’t think the associate is “adjusting to the culture.” Soon, she’s been fired— although not before the higher-ups ask Molly to ask her to tone it down. Molly declines with the necessary adroitness, but privately resents that she is expected to be the “black translator.”

Ms. Orji’s large, vivid features have the eloquence of a silent film ingenue’s. In that scene, as she listens to her white boss’s awkward request, her smile barely slips, but her eyes communicate the dismay and exasperation she feels on her own behalf, the concern she feels on the associate’s, and the resignation—even, perhaps, the complacency—of someone who’s been proved right.

“She had to seem like she was doing nothing,” Mr. Penny says. “Any reaction at all would be overselling it. The audience is with her; she doesn’t need to be visibly upset, because the audience is upset for her. So that was one of those scenes where we were in the room, watching on the monitors, and we felt like we really got that specific thing we wanted.”

For much of her life, Yvonne Orji had a more predictable career path in mind than acting: “I was absolutely 100 percent going to be a 4 6 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

doctor.”

Ms. Orji’s parents emigrated from Nigeria to settle in Maryland when she was 6. Like many immigrant parents, she says, they had high—and traditional—expectations of their daughter. Throughout her adolescence, Ms. Orji was content to share those aspirations, getting high grades and never questioning her eventual medical career. “I was the good girl,” she says.

But not long after arriving at GW, she began to get clues that becoming a physician might not be in the cards.

“Everything about organic chemistry, along with the fact that I don’t like blood or incisions, let me know I probably wouldn’t be good at being a doctor,” Ms. Orji says.

Still, she wasn’t ready to buck both her parents’ expectations and her own longstanding intentions. She gritted her teeth and stayed the course, graduating with a major in sociology and a double minor in biology and public health. She switched from medical school to a public health graduate program as a compromise, and it was as a graduate student at GW that she made the decision that would shape her future: a jokey entry in the Miss Nigeria in America Pageant.

Ms. Orji had never done a pageant before.

When, weeks before the competition, she received an entry form that asked, among other things, for her “talent,” she was stumped: “I don’t have a talent! I just bought a dress! I thought this was supposed to be easy!”

One thing Ms. Orji did know how to do was talk. Since her childhood, she says, she’d talked to herself in the mirror, playing different parts, asking herself questions and answering them. She liked telling stories.

And she found it easy—if not compulsive—to make people laugh.

A devout born-again Christian, Orji prayed about it. “And all I heard was ‘Comedy,’” she says.

She wrote a five-minute set based on her own immigrant-family experience. The writing part was easy: Ms. Orji liked to write, even opting into an optional 50-page paper as an undergraduate so she could graduate with honors. But the performing part was new, and Ms. Orji says she was “terrified” as she stepped onto the stage.

“I honestly did not want to do comedy,” she says. “I was immensely afraid of it, because I was afraid of rejection.”

Her fears didn’t manifest: The material was a hit. The thrill of the performance lingered in the back of Ms. Orji’s mind, and a few months later she entered the D.C.’s Funniest College Students competition. She won the GW round and went on to do a set at the DC Improv comedy club. Each time, the pull of the stage got a little stronger and Ms.

Orji’s nerves a little less raw.

“The more and more I walked the stage and came out and did it, the easier it was,” she says.

Still, Ms. Orji wasn’t quite prepared to buck 20 years of expectations. She dutifully completed her master’s, even traveling to post-conflict Liberia to work on HIV and teen pregnancy prevention for six months.

“It was literally the ultimate stalling mechanism,” she says. “Like, sure, I’ll go to a war-torn country! Just don’t make me tell my parents I don’t want to be a doctor.”

When her contract in Liberia expired, she flew home. It was 2009, and the recession made job-hunting difficult. But for Ms. Orji, the stagnant job market was a gift: If she couldn’t get hired in public health, she had carte blanche to try something new. She told her parents she wanted to move to New York City and try making stand-up comedy her career.

They accepted her decision, but were worried. So was Ms. Orji. “I didn’t know if it was a thing I could live off, but I knew it was something I was good at, and I knew it scared the crap out of me,” she said. “So I thought it was important to let that manifest a little.”

The next few years were tenuous, taken up with what Ms. Orji calls “the hustle.” In New York, she wrote, networked and took every chance to perform. She spent a few months as an artist in residence at the University of Richmond, teaching acting to undergraduate students. When she got an opportunity to intern with the writing staff of Love That Girl!, a TV One series starring Tatyana Ali, she moved to Los Angeles. There, she wrote, directed and produced the online pilot of First Gen, a semi-autobiographical sitcom about a Nigerian-American girl who gives up medical school to become a comic. And, with First Gen as an icebreaker, she struck up a friendship on Twitter with a writer and actress named Issa Rae. “Chemistry is one of those things that’s weird to quantify: Issa and Yvonne just click,” says Prentice Penny, Insecure’s showrunner.

“They understand how to give each other space to be funny, and when to pivot to the straight man role. It’s almost instinctive.”

Their characters’ relationship is essential to Insecure’s appeal. Issa and Molly have a loving, complicated, lived-in rapport that combines friendship’s intimate shorthand with the no-nonsense frankness of sisters— and with the quickfire rhythm of two good comedians bouncing off each other.

“There’s an intimacy and a humor they bring to that friendship that isn’t like much else on TV, and for the viewer it feels like a privilege to be included in that,” says

COURTESY HBO

Sonia Saraiya, the Variety TV critic. “The arc of the show is about Issa and Molly, not about them and some guy. It speaks a lot to the importance of female friendships, and especially to the importance of female friendships in this very specific world of black women who are college-educated.”

Ms. Rae and Ms. Orji, too, bonded over their shared position in the entertainment industry. “We had this mutual bond as black girls in L.A. trying to be content creators,” Ms. Orji says. And when Insecure was picked up by HBO, Ms. Rae called her directly.

“She said, ‘You’ll still have to audition, but I think you’d be cool for this part,’” Ms. Orji remembers. “I was just grateful to her for thinking of me.”

In fact, Ms. Orji admits, hiring her would be a risk. Despite her years of hustling in the world of comedy and the viral success of First Gen, which had attracted Oscar-nominated actor (and fellow Nigerian) David Oyelowo as a producer, she had just two named acting credits on her résumé.

“I hadn’t even done my Dick Wolf,” she says, referring to the producer of the popular Law & Order franchise, on which many actors appear at the beginning of their careers as crooks, witnesses and murder victims.

And even with Ms. Rae’s backing, the audition process was grueling. “I think we brought her back four times,” Mr. Penny recalls. “And every single time she’d get better and make more interesting choices. I thought, if she’s doing this in an audition, with basically no direction, how great is she going to be when she has a chance to play with it?”

Months after that first call from Ms. Rae, Ms. Orji finally got the news. She had the part.

“One thing I really appreciate about HBO, and about Issa, is that they want to provide opportunity,” she says. “There were a lot of firsts on this show: It was Issa’s first time being greenlit, it was my first major role, it was [director] Melina [Matsoukas]’s first time doing television. We all had the ability, but we might not have been given the opportunity to advance.”

Ms. Orji’s comedy background was part of the reason she was cast as Molly. “The writers wanted somebody who understood comic timing,” she says. But it had its flip side.

Accustomed to using the whole stage as a comic, she had to adapt to television acting.

There were a lot of firsts on this show: It was Issa’s first time being greenlit, it was my first major role, it was [director] Melina [Matsoukas]’s first time doing television. We all had the ability, but we might not have been given the opportunity to advance.

Yvonne Orji (left) and her Insecure co-star Issa Rae

“That’s natural for stand-up performers,” says Mr. Penny. “When you’re onstage, it’s very physical. You’re playing to the back row, to the entire room. In television, the camera is right there. If you arch an eyebrow, it seems gigantic.”

As a stage performer, Ms. Orji is particularly “big—big eyes, big hands,” she says. “The first few weeks of shooting was about the writers dialing me back and reeling me in. We had to find a balance.”

In fact, she came to enjoy the process and the new skills it has afforded her. “Comedy’s low-hanging fruit for me, so I wanted to be able to tap into drama,” she says. “I always love those moments when I get to channel different levels and emotions.”

But she still enjoys the chance to flex her comic muscles. In one of the pilot’s funniest beats, after a climactic argument with Issa, Molly tries to storm out of her best friend’s car—and is thwarted by the automatic lock. Ms. Orji improvised the moment, an opportunity she says she rarely gets on the meticulously scripted show.

“I thought, what would be the most epic fail for Molly at this very heightened moment?” she says. “Oh, getting stuck in the car. And it made it to the pilot!”

On the edge of the alcove in the Baltimore Convention Center, it looks like another epic fail could be imminent. Hovering mid-lunge, perilous heels a-twinkle, Ms. Orji is poised either to crash or to triumph. She pushes off, wobbles, springs forward— —and makes it. Without having compromised her choice of footwear.

“When the big stuff you envisioned for yourself starts manifesting, you’re almost like, ‘Is this really happening?’” Ms. Orji says of this moment in her career: her show renewed, her first awards season under her belt, strangers recognizing her at the grocery store. “It’s like when you get a report card: ‘Oh my god, I didn’t fail?’

“When you’re in the struggle, all you can think of is rising above it, what’s on the other side,” she says. “When you start walking on the other side of it, it’s hard to believe you’re walking in what you prayed for. Everybody doesn’t get to experience this moment. It blows my mind.”

Safely established on the wall in Baltimore, ready to shoot her magazine cover, Ms. Orji dusts off her blazer, shakes out her hair, flashes a grin.

“No problem,” she says. g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 4 7

A BY-NO-MEANS-COMPLETE GUIDE TO GW ALUMS WORKING TO MAKE EVERY HOUR HAPPY

This article was LONG FERMENTING. We SCOURED and SEARCHED to compile A LIST of GW COMMUNITY MEMBERS paying the bills by MAKING OUR DRINKS. We found BREWERS, one CIDERIST, DISTILLERS, VINTNERS, OWNERS, ENTREPRENEURS, FOUNDERS and even ONE GUY who used to refuel NUCLEAR AIRCRAFT CARRIERS. THESE ARE some of their stories.

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 4 9

HIGHLAND BREWING COMPANY ASHEVILLE, N.C.

Hollie Stephenson, BA ’03, is the ranking brewer at Highland Brewing Company, a large, regional brewery in Asheville, N.C., making 45,000 barrels a year for multistate distribution. She formerly worked at Stone Brewing Co., a national brewery based in San Diego.

An ex-health and biomedical research lobbyist, Ms. Stephenson switched careers in 2011 at age 30 after getting a certificate in practical brewing in England. An IPA enthusiast, she chatted with us about being the rare female brewmaster, how the industry has changed since the days of Old Milwaukee’s Swedish bikini team and whether she’d ever like to strike out on her own.

Is the industry changing?

Just in the time I’ve been in beer, I’ve seen a lot more young women being able to enter. My predecessors … have horror stories about getting laughed out of places, before the proliferation of schools that offered brewing educations. So [let’s say] you’ve got a woman who randomly walks into a brewery and asks if they can start helping you, and you’ve got your dude with the gut and the beard walking in, and somehow, you know, he has the look— the credibility. But now that there are so many brewing programs, I think women have something to show for it when they walk in.

It sounds like there’s been a leveling of the playing field.

I was probably, maybe, the third or fourth woman that had ever worked on the brewery floor at Stone. And in the three years that I

5 0 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

was there, they hired probably another five women, just in that time. So I’ve seen change already. The brewing department staff is eight people, and two of them are women here at Highland, which is awesome.

What do you think about how women, traditionally, have been portrayed in beerrelated media?

Maybe it’s not as [bad] as bikinis and wet hair and spring break and all that, but how many women do you actually see drinking beer in these commercials? That aren’t some object? Or see them, period? Or they aren’t some object of a bar flirtation?

You’ve worked exclusively at established breweries, one national and one regional. Do you have plans to start your own?

When I first got into this and started learning about beer and first started working at Stone, I thought that was my end goal. But then I realized that I like being at big breweries. And operating your own place is a lot of risk for, potentially, not much reward in a market that’s becoming more and more crowded. … At Highland, I’ve been able to put my own recipes in bottles. They’ve given me a lot of creative control over the beer. For example, Highland hadn’t released a new year-round beer in 15 years, and [in 2016] we released three new core beers [the Highland IPA (last year’s No. 2 seller), Highland Pilsner, the Mandarina IPA], all of which were my recipes. So I’m getting the best sides of it.

THE NUCLEAR OPTION SUGAR CREEK BREWING CO. CHARLOTTE, N.C.

For 13 years, Todd Franklin, CERT ’14, worked as a nuclear engineer at Newport News Shipbuilding in

Virginia, primarily refueling nuclear aircraft carriers—a process that takes about four years and is performed halfway through a carrier’s 50-year lifespan.

In 2014, Mr. Franklin, a home brewer since 1996, quit his job to pursue a twodecade-old dream and help found Sugar Creek Brewing Co. in Charlotte, becoming its head brewer.

The two fields—nuclear engineering and beer making—are not as unrelated as they seem.

“I still have all these 500-gallon, up to 3,000-gallon tanks,” Mr. Franklin says, “but now they’re full of beer, whereas all the tanks I dealt with before … they contained, usually, some type of radioactive liquid waste.”

At the shipyard, Mr. Franklin worked on the carriers Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Nimitz and Enterprise. The eighth U.S. vessel to hold that name and commissioned in 1961, the Enterprise was the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

Mr. Franklin started Sugar Creek with a friend who had left the shipyard years earlier. They had money saved and had been involved in business together, spending years flipping and renting houses as a side hustle.

At the brewery, Mr. Franklin works on yeast-centric Belgian and Belgian-inspired beers, and he says brewing’s confluence of science and art is suited to his analytical sort of creativity. And again, the leap from refueling 1,200-foot nuclear aircraft carriers to making beer? Not that far.

Accidentally blowing stuff up is a hazard in both fields (one kind of explosion being considerably less survivable than the other), and a lot of the equipment and processes are basically the same.

“When you refuel a carrier, they can shut down the reactor, but it’s still creating heat until you get all that old fuel out,” Mr. Franklin says. “So you have to put all the systems in place that take the place of the ship’s systems and keep the reactor safe while you’re taking apart the ship.

“All of those systems, they look very similar and they operate very similar to what we have in the brewery. Everything I dealt with was stainless steel tanks, stainless steel pipe, some flexible hoses that are almost identical to the beer hoses—the brewers hoses that we drag around—inch-and-a-half or two-inch hoses, centrifugal pumps and solenoid valves.”

TA P H A N D L E : W I L L I A M AT K I N S / F R A N K L I N : C O U R T E S T Y T O D D F R A N K L I N

WOMEN IN BREWING

“I WANTED TO CREATE SOMETHING THAT I HAD LIVING ABROAD BUT WAS UNABLE TO GET STATESIDE.”

ALL THINGS, ESPECIALLY RESIDUAL SUGAR, IN MODERATION

C I D E R : W I L L I A M AT K I N S / B E A R : L U K E D I X O N

BROOKS DRY CIDER SAN FRANCISCO

Brooks Bennett, born in California but raised in England, developed a taste for hard cider while growing up overseas and studying abroad in South Africa.

Upon returning to the United States full time, he found it hard to scratch his cider itch.

So he started his own cidery.

“I wanted to create something that I had living abroad but was unable to get stateside,” says the San Franciscobased Mr. Bennett, BA ’09.

Brooks Dry Cider—

it’s in the style of international ciders, which are less sweet than American iterations—is that something.

“It’s crisper,” Mr. Bennett says of his cider.

“It has a better balance between the acidity and the flavor. There’s something about the sweet stuff that’s overwhelming. You can only have one of them before you get a little sick. So there’s something nice about being able to have more than one cider in a night.”

Mr. Bennett started making cider in his parents’ garage seven years ago from apple juice and yeast. The first batch was “bone dry,” meaning it had no residual sugar.

“I really liked it,” Mr. Bennett says.

His friends liked it less. So he added some sugar, and just a few months later, he had the recipe that became Brooks Dry Cider, now made at a nearby (but undisclosed) winery from a variety of crushed dessert apples. He sold his first batch in late 2014, joining a growing craft-cider market that is increasingly offering people something less sweet than Angry Orchard or Woodchuck.

Today, there about 600 to 700 cideries in the United States, according to the U.S. Association of Cider Makers, and a law loosening hard cider regulations, the CIDER Act, took effect Jan. 1, 2017.

“It’s kind of unbelievable, the growth that’s happened,” Mr. Bennett says. “I don’t think anyone could have seen that. It was like, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if [cider] became totally normal?’” g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 5 1

THE INDIE WINEMAKER WHO MADE IT TO THE WHITE HOUSE Susie Selby, MBA ’85, started her winery in 1994 and for five years she worked at another winery just to keep hers going.

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At this point, Ms. Selby had no tasting room and sold no wine directly to consumers.

She relied on wine festivals and increasingly effusive reviews from publications like Wine Spectator to get national distribution while making and storing her wine in a gloomy, rented warehouse that felt haunted. A man allegedly died there in the 1970s, and Ms. Selby says she and her employees heard footsteps and doors slamming while working there late at night.

But Selby Winery remained on tenuous financial footing, and its proprietor, driven by self-preservation, continued to work her second job at Rabbit Ridge Winery. There, over five years, Ms. Selby learned the wine business and clambered up the Rabbit Ridge depth chart from tasting room manager to warehouse manager to cellar master and, finally, assistant winemaker.

Ms. Selby had no formal winemaking education, and working at Rabbit Ridge compensated for that as she built cachet, drudging in the cellars and putting away her MBA to lift wine casks and drive a forklift.

“I could manage a group of guys—and they were all guys—because I had a [crucial] job, and you can’t effectively manage people if you’re not a key player and if you can’t do all the jobs,” Ms. Selby says. “So I was the first one there in the morning and the last one to leave at night. I would help them fill barrels, crush grapes, rack and clean tanks, whatever we were doing.”

She was the only woman there.

“The owner was very, very good to me,” Ms. Selby says. “... He wasn’t sexist at all, and you still don’t see that many women on a forklift or women doing that type of manual work in wine country.”

Rabbit Ridge, in a very direct way, also is the reason her Chardonnays and Sauvignon Blancs went to Washington.

One day in 1999, a guy who happened to be the White House’s director of food and beverage walked in for a tasting.

Ms. Selby emceed the usher’s wine flight and answered his questions before going above and beyond and giving him a personal cellar tour. During that hour and a half, Ms. Selby tactfully, if not a bit opportunistically, plugged the wine she made at her then-fledgling haunted warehouse winery.

“I didn’t realize who he was, and he came into the tasting room and was just a wonderful man,” Ms. Selby says. “He was interested in learning, and I asked him to come back so I could teach him more about wine since he just had this new dream job.

And when I got a call from the White House, I had no idea why they were ordering it.”

The phone call came within six months or so, and since then, Selby wine has been

W I N E B O T T L E : W I L L I A M AT K I N S / S E L B Y : M I C H A E L Z A G A R I S

SUSIE SELBY

usie Selby, MBA ’85, tells a story about the early days of her DIY indie Sonoma County winery and her late cat, Bob. Since those days, she’s had her wine served at the White House through three presidential administrations—Clinton, Bush (W.) and Obama—and at the Sundance Film Festival, developing a modest acquaintance with Robert Redford in the process.

But before all that, around the time she supported herself by working at another winery while building her own and sleeping only when time and ambition allowed, Ms. Selby was an upstart 30-something woman in yet another male-dominated industry.

Enter Bob, Selby Winery general manager, 1994-2013.

“I was doing a sales meeting about five years ago, and it was a distributor in Arizona whom I had been with forever,” Ms. Selby says. “I said, ‘Do you have any questions?’ And he said, ‘Well, how’s Bob?’ And I had a cat named Bob. He was this 26-pound Maine coon. He’s no longer with me, but he was then. I said, ‘Oh my gosh, that is so sweet that you care about Bob.’ And he said, ‘Is he still your general manager?’ And I started laughing.”

Wait, it gets better.

“In the old days,” Ms. Selby continues, “they’d say we need to get a discount in order to sell your Chardonnay, and I’d say, ‘Well, let me talk to Bob and get back to you,’” Ms. Selby says. “And I’d come home and go, ‘Do I want to give them a discount?’ or whatever, and I’d call them back and say, ‘You know, I’m really sorry, but Bob said absolutely not.’ And so I had this pretend GM named Bob who was my cat.” [laughing] “My problem in a male-dominated industry is I really don’t have typical male characteristics,” Ms. Selby says. “I’m nonconfrontational. I’m emotional. I just have [traditionally] strong female characteristics; I always have. And it doesn’t make me the greatest businessperson in the world—it probably makes me a better winemaker.

Once my dad passed away, there’s never been male involvement because I’ve avoided partners and investors. So all I’ve ever had as a partner is my poor deceased cat, Bob, but he ruled with an iron fist.”

Paw. Iron paw. Whatever. Anyway.

Ms. Selby founded Selby Winery in 1994 with her father, David, a noted spine surgeon and lifetime wine buff who left as patrimony, among other things, a love of wine. When Dr. Selby died in 1997, it forced Ms. Selby to scramble.

poured for foreign leaders—including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair—as well as at Mr. Obama’s 49th birthday party.

Ms. Selby says the Clintons and Bushes liked the Chardonnay, while the Obamas favored the Sauvignon Blanc. Years later, Ms. Selby went on a White House tour with that usher, Daniel Shanks, and she asked why he picked her wine.

“I said, ‘Do you always do this for your winemakers?’” Ms. Selby says. “And he said, ‘No… you spent an hour and a half teaching me about wine, and it just was a big unsolicited act of kindness I’m happy I could repay some day.’”

In 2000, Ms. Selby quit Rabbit Ridge to go full time at her winery. A few years later, she opened a new tasting room in a little box of a house she bought in downtown Healdsburg, Calif.—with a new, un-haunted production house just a few blocks down the road.

At its high point, Selby Winery produced 28,000 cases of wine a year, but now successful, Ms. Selby has scaled back to 13,000 cases a year and picked up golf.

Four summers in and she’s yet to break 100, but she’s never sold out her indie soul, eschewing all would-be business partners after her father, except, of course, for Bob.

Susie Selby in her winery’s production house in Healdsburg, Calif.

INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE: The alcohol it took America the longest to conquer PAGE 80

Susie Selby received this letter after the White House served her Chardonnay on a night when President George W. Bush hosted British Prime Minister Tony Blair for dinner.

AN OLD ITALIAN WINE RECIPE TURNS INTO… A CRAFT BREWERY?

Ethan Applen is an owner and founder of Lakes & Legends Brewing in Minneapolis.

FINDING HIS BELGIAN NICHE LAKES & LEGENDS BREWING COMPANY MINNEAPOLIS

Ethan Applen worked in business development at Disney and Warner Bros. for almost 20 years and, not surprisingly, took a market-based approach to opening his brewery, Lakes & Legends Brewing Company in Minneapolis.

“When you’re starting anything,” says Mr. Applen who spent four years at GW before bolting home to California in 1996 to chase the dot-com boom, “it needs to address a problem or a need.”

Mr. Applen and his partners researched Minneapolis’ demographics (education and income levels, median house prices), its geography (where weren’t there breweries?) and, most importantly, its beers.

They found that, just like the rest of the country, India pale ales were No. 1, and in the process, determined the problem they would solve—the need they would address.

“You’ve either got to have the best IPA or the cheapest IPA because there’s already 50 local IPAs in our market plus however many international or national brands,” Mr. Applen says. “I think that this makes the business that much harder. Some guys do it, but I always say, ‘Look, we’ve got great IPAs here in Minnesota, so why make another?’”

So they didn’t, opting to focus on Belgianinspired beers, which also, serendipitously, aligned with Mr. Applen’s tastes. He had home-brewed Belgian beers for years.

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Legends & Lakes also dabbles with fruitinfused beers as well as with saisons, which come in seasonal variations like rosemary-juniper and cucumbermint.

“Those have been some of our most popular beers,” Mr. Applen says.

“We’ve learned that people are looking for alternatives, and sometimes they are those IPA drinkers who are still looking to find different beers.”

Is market research punk rock?

Mr. Applen admits that it’s not. But he also says that as the craft-beer industry grows, there will be all kinds.

“There is room for many different things,” he says. “I think it’s just that craft brewing is still growing and maturing and becoming what it’s gonna be.”

Today, there are, according to the Brewers Association, more than 5,000 breweries in the United States, well-surpassing the pre-Prohibition high of 4,131 set in 1873.

Jay DeCianno, MBA ’03, surveyed the market and decided there was room for one more.

“We’re on the tip of the iceberg,” says Mr. DeCianno, a co-founder and co-owner of Quattro Goomba’s Winery and Quattro Goomba’s Brewery in Aldie, Va. “We always say that.”

From 2014 to 2015, 433 craft breweries opened in the United States, and, just since 2012, the number of craft breweries has more than doubled as laws passed after Prohibition’s repeal in 1933, now antiquated, get overturned in the blessed name of the free market and job creation.

The wiping away of one such law allowed Mr. DeCianno to open Quattro Goomba’s Brewery in 2015. He hired a home brewer who had worked in his winery tasting room to make the beer.

After a career designing weapons systems for Marine Corps tanks, Mr. DeCianno and his partners opened Quattro Goomba’s winery in 2008.

Mr. DeCianno used a centuries-old recipe from his Italian family to get it started, making the wine in his basement and, starting in 2006, selling it in a local Northern Virginia shop. Demand convinced him to open a tasting room.

But he always had his eye on the expanding craft beer industry. Now he’s got the two-fer: a winery and a brewery. If you count his pizzeria, which operates out of the brewery, it’s the three-fer.

Mr. DeCianno says that while the West Coast craft beer scene can be crowded, there still is plenty of (tap) room in the East.

“We’re far from saturated in this area, and there’s plenty of space, but you’ve got to manage it,” he says. “You can’t just say, ‘I’m gonna put in a hundredbarrel brewhouse, and we’re going to move beer and take over.’ You’ve to manage your growth and ease into it, do it all organically.”

A P P L E N : C O U R T E S T Y E T H A N A P P L E N / O T H E R S : W I L L I A M AT K I N S

QUATTRO GOOMBA’S ALDIE, VA.

“PEOPLE JUST WEREN’T EXPECTING TO FIND DRAFT BEER. THE PEOPLE WE WOULD SELL OUR BEER TO ARE LIKE ‘ARE YOU SURE THIS IS A GOOD IDEA? EVERYONE ELSE IS IN BOTTLES.’” ON TAP AT MACHU PICCHU

B E E R G L A S S : i S T O C K . C O M / M P H I L L I P S 0 0 7 / G I A M M AT T E O : C O U R T E S T Y J O E G I A M M AT T E O

SACRED VALLEY BREWING COMPANY OLLANTAYTAMBO, PERU

There’s a probably a screenplay—something in the mode of Casablanca, but with freer travel and less world war—to be written about Joe Giammatteo, BS ’05, and his decision to help start a brewery in a little Peruvian village that sits 30 miles away from Machu Picchu.

Sacred Valley Brewing Company (Cerveceria del Valle Sagrado in español) opened on Halloween 2014 and in the years since has become a veritable Rick’s Cafe, serving locals, tourists and expats in a handbuilt outpost.

“We’re a weird oasis,” says Mr. Giammatteo, who, inspired by a backpacking trip through Peru, left a job at Oakshire Brewing in Eugene, Ore., to learn Spanish and open Sacred Valley with childhood friend and native Peruvian Juan Mayorga (both attended high school in Bethesda, Md.).

Sacred Valley,

Mr. Giammatteo says, has helped introduce draft beer to Ollantaytambo, the dusty valley town of 2,500 where the brewery sits in an earthen villa under terracotta tiles.

Mr. Giammatteo says industrially bottled beer is the norm in Peru because of limited space in centuries-old buildings and the high cost of even low-tech equipment like refrigeration. Even at Sacred Valley Brewing, must-haves like electricity aren’t always reliable.

“People just weren’t expecting to find draft beer,” he says. “The people we would sell our beer to are like ‘Are you sure this is a good idea? Everyone else is in bottles.’”

Peruvian craft beer is barely in its infancy, with fewer than 50 breweries in existence. Even beer itself, according to Mr. Giammatteo, doesn’t have a footprint because the Spanish, a people with a scant brewing tradition, settled Peru.

“In Brazil, there are a lot of

Germans and Italians that immigrated post-World War II, and the same sort of heritage can be found in Argentina and Chile—more of an Anglo-mixed heritage,” Mr. Giammatteo says. “Those people tend to have had more brewing history or experience.”

Mr. Giammatteo says he got involved with the brewery as a consultant, came to a crossroads and just couldn’t let go.

“I was also being asked to read over résumés for potential head brewers,” he says, “and I was like, ‘Shoot, I can’t choose somebody. I want to do it myself.’”

Joe Giammatteo is a cofounder of Sacred Valley Brewing in Peru. He’s also the head brewer. g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 5 5

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MICHAEL Z AGARIS

Steven Mirassou is the proprietor of Steven Kent Winery in Livermore, Calif.

He also is the winemaker.

Bordeaux varieties—Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, Merlot and Petit Verdot—about 40 miles southeast of Oakland and about 40 miles inland from Santa Clara County where Mr. Mirassou’s ancestors in 1854 planted some of California’s first vineyards. Steven Kent— the first and middle names of Mr. Mirassou and his father—is a venture toward Twenty years ago, sixth-generation a kind of atonement for what, in hindsight, seems more like a winemaker Steven Mirassou confronted selling out than a selling of the his lineage. Today, he defines it. family name.

“The family had an opportunity to take advantage of certain situations that it didn’t end up taking advantage of,” Mr. Mirassou says. “When I think about what the family accomplished over time, it’s sort of bittersweet in a way. The first mover—the first company into a certain industry usually has a gigantic advantage teven Mirassou, BA ’86, is the over the people that come after them. We had Mirassou of that mass-produced an opportunity as a family to do significantly $10 wine you’ve seen everywhere, better and more in the business than what we the one with the yellow label ended up doing.” and the Art Nouveau sun, that’s Mr. Mirassou admits that it’s strange kept cheaply and plenteously on to see his name on a bottle of wine suburban supermarket shelves. that he didn’t make and that he That is not Mr. Mirassou’s doesn’t endorse, except to say that wine. It hasn’t been since 2002, it’s fine for the price. The wine when his cousins sold the name Mr. Mirassou makes today starts to Gallo—another patrician California at $65 and goes up to $165 for his wine family—and today the wine in those flagship. Mr. Mirassou’s mission Mirassou bottles has nothing, other than today, which, when he talks about it, the name, to do with the wine the Mirassou sounds more like divine obligation, is family made for five generations. to grow fruit in one great region and “You can only have so many Gallo-labeled make one great wine. bottles, so they buy other brands, like “If you are in the area that can Louis Martini, like Mirassou, so they could produce that kind of fruit,” says have more facings on the store shelves,” Mr. Mirassou of the Livermore Mr. Mirassou says.

Valley, “and you don’t choose Between the selling of the family wine to do that, I think you’ve business and now, Mr. Mirassou has left wasted an opportunity, the wine industry and returned. As a young wasted resources. And, if man, a romantic enamored with the East you want to be dramatic Coast, he wanted to teach literature at a fancy about it, you’ve committed college and write novels. Two mind-numbing a little bit of a sin because real jobs later (one in software and one in you’re supposed to take municipal street sweeping) and one nearwhat you have and, as a religious experience drinking a 70-year-old winemaker, help to marshal dessert wine from his grandfather’s private and shepherd this beautiful, store, he’s back and trying to rewrite and, in a fragile thing to its ultimate sense, redeem his family’s oenological legacy. quality destiny. And if you “I wanted to get back to that original take shortcuts and you impulse, which was to make one great wine— don’t do that, you’re sinning one world-class wine, one iconic wine,” against something that Mr. Mirassou says. “Or at least aspire to that.” should have been the goal.”

In 1996, Mr. Mirassou and his father Mr. Mirassou’s grasp of founded Steven Kent Winery in the the sentimental is firm. He Livermore Valley, a wine region suited for wrote his undergraduate

STEVEN MIRASSOU

W I L L I A M AT K I N S

THE MIRASSOU REDEMPTION

thesis on Willa Cather, got a master’s degree in literature from New York University and rereads The Great Gatsby on occasion, just to see if he can find anything new in there. He is attuned to his winemaking ancestors, going all the way back to the Mirassou patriarch, Pierre Pellier, in 1854, and nurses an immanent connection to what he now feels is a birthright.

Mr. Mirassou grew up playing in his family’s vineyards and in their tasting rooms decorated with pictures of dead Mirassou vintners. Those pictures now hang in his Steven Kent tasting room. And although Steven Kent makes six wines, he designated just one—his best, the $165 bottle—to represent the Mirassou heritage. It’s a Bordeaux blend he dubbed Lineage.

“I don’t think I thought about Lineage at first as a way to redeem the family,” Mr. Mirassou says. “I think it’s related to my thoughts of what ultimately happened to Mirassou over the 150-some-odd years that it was in existence. I look at Lineage as a separate thing now. Lineage is about the Mirassou family from six generations forward, moving with, hopefully, a very focused idea and a focused plan about what it’s capable of accomplishing.”

For a while, it looked like Mr. Mirassou wouldn’t end up in wine. He says no one in the family pushed the business on him, and it wasn’t until his late 20s, spurred by conversations with his father, that he decided to start making wine.

Then, for Christmas in 1994, his father gave him that 70-year-old bottle, passed down from Mr. Mirassou’s grandfather. It contained a California Angelica, a fortified dessert-style white wine.

Mr. Mirassou later recorked the empty bottle so he could revisit the smell of that wine.

“It just bespoke of time,” he says of the wine, which tasted like roasted nuts, saddle leather, brandy, cherries and vanilla. “You can smell the work that went into the wine. It was just a very romantic moment for me at that point in time, and it was one of those things that said, ‘If you can feel [that way] about a simple wine like this that was not expensive and not highly regarded from a production standpoint, then maybe you should be looking at getting back in the business as an adult.’” g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 5 7

THE BEER LOBBY DENIZENS BREWING CO. SILVER SPRING, MD.

The dry pall of Prohibition still hangs over the American booze industry, even 84 years after the 21st Amendment dispirited teetotalers everywhere.

States passed a web of regulatory laws after Prohibition’s repeal, and many, just vestigial at this point, remain in effect today, frustrating would-be entrepreneurs and retarding an industry that even politicians see as economically invincible.

Julie Verratti, JD ’10, business development director and co-proprietor of Denizens Brewing Co. in Silver Spring, Md., is familiar with these laws. The former home brewer has fought them, changing two in Maryland that enabled her to more easily open her brewery and, subsequently, others to open theirs.

“There was no one working on this but me,” Ms. Verratti says. “I don’t think anyone was even thinking about it.”

Ms. Verratti is a veteran of the U.S. Small Business Administration and a former field operative and lobbyist for MassEquality, which pushed to get same-sex marriage legalized in Massachusetts and fought would-be amendments to the state constitution 5 8 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

that would have overturned the state supreme court’s 2003 pro-gay marriage ruling.

Starting in fall 2013, Ms. Verratti loosed her lobbying fury on Montgomery County, first going after a law that prevented production breweries without restaurants from having taprooms. That fell on July 1, 2014, along with another law that forbade booze merchants from self-distributing.

Ms. Verratti took that one down, too, crediting her experience in Massachusetts.

“That whole effort was about lobbying and getting legislators to change their mind in the face of opposition,” says Ms. Verratti, who also has testified before Congress in an effort to reduce federal excise taxes on craft breweries.

Last year, Denizens produced 1,550 barrels of beer—its most popular is the Southside Rye IPA; DBC also dabbles in sour beer—up about 400 from the year before, and hosted Chelsea Clinton, who stopped by during her mother’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Owned by Ms. Verratti, her wife Emily Bruno and head brewer Jeff Ramirez, Denizens also is one of the few majorityfemale-owned breweries in the country and the only one in Maryland. And if not for a little lobbying, Denizens, with its taproom and self-distribution, may not have existed.

“We would have been able to open the brewery and operate,” Ms. Verratti says, “but we wouldn’t have gotten our bank loan and probably wouldn’t have been as successful as we have been because there were so many restrictions on our model.”

WAITING IS THE HARDEST (AND MOST EXPENSIVE) PART BLACK BUTTON DISTILLING ROCHESTER, N.Y.

Jason Barrett opened Black Button Distilling in 2014 in Rochester, N.Y., years after it became clear that he couldn’t go into the 95-year-old family business—making highend men’s suit buttons from water buffalo horns—because he’s color blind.

“There was always a joke that if I did take over the family business,” Mr. Barrett says, “we’d have to switch to only making black buttons.”

Mr. Barrett, who studied for an MBA at GW before leaving early to open his distillery, talked with us about the agony of opening a business predicated on waiting years to sell your signature product. (Spoiler: It worked out. Black Button took home a silver medal for its bourbon at the 2016 American Craft Spirits Awards.)

Bourbon takes years to mature. Is the wait terrifying?

That creates a big cash-flow problem. How do you keep the lights on? How do you pay rent if you don’t have product to sell? And so, I guess I could have taken two years, made whiskey … and waited to come out. Then we would be just a bourbon operation. But since we needed positive cash flow, we started making vodka and gin and moonshine, all of which only take about two weeks to make.

V E R R AT T I : C O U R T E S T Y J U L I E V E R R AT T I / B O T T L E : W I L L I A M AT K I N S

Julie Verratti is a co-owner/founder of Denizens Brewing Co. in Silver Spring, Md.

“LISTEN. THIS IS IMPORTANT STUFF, AND I REALLY NEED TO GET IT RIGHT BECAUSE I SOLD MY HOUSE, CASHED IN MY 401K, TOOK EVERY PENNY I HAD.”

WILLIAMS: COURTEST Y CHRISTOPHER BRIAR WILLIAMS

And you don’t even know if it’s going to taste good.

That’s always frustrating on the bourbon because, if you make a tweak in production, we can get the preliminary results in about six months, but we won’t really know the full effect it has on the final product for two to four years.

Were you worried that the bourbon might be awful?

I don’t know that we were ever in danger of making a bad one. It was researched well enough that it wasn’t going to be a bad one; it just wouldn’t have lived up to our goals and our expectations. I knew enough about the process when we got into this that we weren’t going to make something unpalatable. It was a question of whether it was going to be bland, good or great.

ROOTS, RYE, BOURBON COPPERSEA DISTILLING WEST PARK, N.Y.

Christopher Briar Williams, BA ’99, is of the uncontroversial view that major whiskey distilleries—those multinational behemoths that each year produce millions of cases via large-scale mechanized methods—make good whiskey.

Accepting that premise, it makes sense that his Coppersea Distilling in New York’s Hudson River Valley went a different direction: “heritage” distilling.

“Why would we try to replicate their process? Even on a small scale,” says Mr. Williams, Coppersea’s chief distiller, referring to the big name brands. “Why don’t we try to find out what’s been lost? Why don’t we go back to the source material?—to the original way they made whiskey in America and try to understand what was so good that they decided they needed to scale it up to the level that it’s at now.”

At Coppersea, which specializes in bourbon and rye whiskey and opened in 2012, Mr. Williams and his partners conducted a bit of alcohol archaeology to reconstruct lost methods. They searched 19th-century gazetteers and studied traditional-minded European and Mexican distillers, while relying on good ol’ fashioned trial and error to necromance disused techniques from beyond the grave.

Coppersea’s diligence has led to, among other discoveries, the resurrection of green malt whiskey, a spirit made from wet malt—dried malt is S.O.P.—and was common, Mr. Williams says, in 1600s and 1700s Scotland. He described making it as “incredibly onerous” and the taste as

“bizarre” and “wonderful.”

“In the moment, you feel like you’re in communion with these people in 1830,” Mr. Williams says of drinking Coppersea’s spirits.

Among Coppersea’s roots-distilling hallmarks is malting its own grain. The vast, vast majority of distillers (and brewers) rely on outsourced malt, which is grain that’s had its starch converted to sugar by kickstarting the sprouting process. The sugar is then fermented into alcohol.

Mr. Williams says that to give Coppersea’s whiskey a “provenance,” they wanted it to be entirely from the Hudson River Valley.

To ensure that, the distillery gets its grain exclusively from the region. Then they malt it themselves through “floor malting,” a labor-intensive practice largely killed off by the Industrial Revolution. Aptly named, floor malting is predicated on germinating the grain on, surprise, a floor. Normally, malting is done in a big vat. Floor malting involves turning the grain by hand with a shovel regularly for days.

“It’s really one of the most ancient forms of biotech,” Mr. Williams says. “It’s a very simple, elegant process they’ve been doing for, really, thousands of years. Well, we said, ‘How difficult can it be?’ And it turns out, it’s its own art form in and of itself.”

While considering Coppersea’s philosophy and methodology, it’s tempting to imagine its staff as the distilling equivalent of Civil War reenactors. So here Mr. Williams offers a caveat to the romance.

“We’re not like steampunks,” he says, with a laugh. “We’re not going to work in period dress. We have a direct-fired still, but we use propane because the fire is important, not the method of getting the fire. What we like to say is we make whiskey in the spirit of traditional distillers.”

Christopher Briar Williams is the chief distiller at Coppersea Distilling in West Park, N.Y.

Your research included five distilling conferences and a master of distilling certificate. Did industry types find that excessive?

They just looked at me like I’m crazy. And I’m like, “Listen. This is important stuff, and I really need to get it right because I sold my house, cashed in my 401K, took every penny I had.” g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 5 9

A lu m n i prof i l e s . . . c l a s s no t e s . . . a rt i s t s’ quaArt lu er mni news

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p. 69//

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Gosbee’s Goodbye

Packing A Vision of Chefs for Oxford the Future D’oeuvre

The president of the Alumni Association looks back on his term

An alumnus becomes the second ever GW-affiliated Rhodes scholar

A new surgery for the farsighted might be the biggest thing since LASIK

p. 72// Honey bees and knife-wielding snakes: paying homage to chefs’ tattoos

ALUMNI NEWS [film]

Transcendent Blues

GE T T Y IMAGES/SMALL Z & R A SKIND

Scott Rosenbaum, BA ’91, spent nearly a decade making his documentary, Sidemen: Long Road to Glory.

Along the way he became a custodian of the legacy of three old bluesmen—and their friend. // By Matthew Stoss

6 0 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

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CLASS NOTES

// 60s & EARLIER Thomas A. Cseh, BA ’67, MA ’73, was appointed regional director for Andrews International’s Latin America operations, which are based in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Andrews International is a private security and consulting firm.

Ira Spar, MD ’68, RES ’75, authored Civil War Hospital Newspapers: Histories and Excerpts of Nine Union Publications (McFarland & Company, July 2015).

The book examines the founding and development of internal Union hospital newspapers, written and published by patients, during the Civil War. Dr. Spar, a Vietnam veteran, serves on the board of the Society of Civil War Surgeons and is president of the Hartford (Conn.) Medical Society.

Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, BA ’69, authored Distant Greens: Golf, Life and Surprising Serendipity On and Off the Fairway (Explorer’s Eye Press, August 2016), a collection of travel stories about golf courses that explores the reasons people love the game.

// 70s Alan S. Nadel, BS ’71, JD ’76, a partner at the intellectual property law firm of Panitch Schwarze Belisario & Nadel LLP in Philadelphia, was recognized in the 2017 edition of The Best Lawyers in America.

Gary S. Horan, MHSA ’73, was recognized in September by the Commerce and Industry Association of New Jersey with a Best Practice Award, which honors business leaders in New Jersey. Mr. Horan is the president and CEO of Trinitas Regional Medical Center, one of only three hospitals in New Jersey to be recognized.

Bruce Merwin, BA ’73, partner at Thompson & Knight LLP, was recognized in the 2016 edition of Texas Super Lawyers and in the 2017 edition of The Best Lawyers in America for construction law and real estate law.

Robert L. Sloan, MA ’73, is a former president and CEO of Washington, D.C.’s Sibley Memorial Hospital, where a 22-foot clock tower was named in his honor. Mr. Sloan led Sibley for 27 years.

Howard L. Williams, LLM ’75, partner at Brooks Pierce, was recognized in the 2017 edition of The Best Lawyers in America.

CONR AD KOCHEK

Gary Kirkbride, MURP ’76, an urban planner in Dewberry’s Fairfax, Va., office, was appointed chairman of the Northern Virginia Conservation Trust board. The organization advocates for public land and appropriate land use.

ways into a three-hour conversation about his labor-of-love-and-anguish documentary blues film, Scott Rosenbaum’s blood-caffeine level is pushing what would be the legal limit, if New York City saw fit to have one.

The 47-year-old 1991 GW grad is

on his nth cup of coffee and describing how he, just some guy from Long Island, a Wall Street trader-turned-filmmaker, came to be a custodian of the legacies of three dead bluesmen: pianist Joseph “Pinetop” Perkins, drummer Willie “Big Eyes” Smith and guitarist Hubert Sumlin.

“The one thing they said to me over and

Phyllis Chestang, MBA ’77, has authored more than 50 books, most recently Changes: Principles of Social Change (CreateSpace, June 2016) and Wooden Nickels, Principles of Corporate Finance (Phyllis Chestang, April 2016). The books are available on Amazon. She is pursuing her PhD in management and decision sciences.

George Brent Mickum IV, BA ’78, is general counsel for ERP Compliant Fuels

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 6 1

over,” Mr. Rosenbaum says, “just in casual conversation, in a formal interview or just sitting in a hotel room at 3 in the morning after a show, was they just want their legacy to be passed on. And that’s why, when they passed, it made this whole thing certainly a lot more important, and in a way, a burden.”

Mr. Rosenbaum’s sturdy, tattooed form is in a swivel chair at the head of an office table as the surrounding Flatiron neighborhood goes dark on the first week of 2017. He’s looking through black-frame glasses and sitting like a drummer because he is one, in a room that’s basically a terrarium for an increasingly common species of human that’s defined by conference calls.

“Now, I could have blown it off,” he continues. “But not really.”

This all started when Mr. Rosenbaum got Mr. Perkins, Mr. Smith and Mr. Sumlin to appear in his first feature-length film, The Perfect Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which starred Peter Fonda and came out in 2009. Steve Conte of the New York Dolls scored the film. A working relationship with the old bluesmen evolved into a friendship, and later, Mr. Rosenbaum, inspired by Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, a concert film featuring the Band, started making a concert film of his own about Mr. Perkins, Mr. Smith and Mr. Sumlin, who played in the bands of legendary Chicago bluesman Muddy Waters and/or Howlin’ Wolf.

Eight arduous years later, that film, Sidemen: Long Road to Glory, has morphed twice, first from a concert film to a concert film interspersed with interviews and then to its current, final incarnation: a straight documentary. Access to the musicians (they were often tightly controlled by handlers) and then their deaths in 2011— Mr. Smith was 75; Mr. Sumlin was 80; Mr. Perkins was 97—forced the format switch.

“Looking back on it, we made a much better film that we would have made if we did the concert [film],” Mr. Rosenbaum says.

“It wouldn’t have been a film that transcends blues audiences.”

The 77-minute movie is narrated by comedian Marc Maron and features interviews with Joe Perry, Bonnie Raitt, Warren Haynes, Joe Bonamassa, Derek Trucks, Greg Allman and Greg Allman Band guitarist Scott Sharrard, among other rock stars. Sidemen premiered in 2016 at South

By Southwest, where it was well-received by critics, spectators and those who knew the bluesmen best.

“I saw Hubert coming alive again,” says 6 2 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

Toni Ann Mamary, Mr. Sumlin’s longtime manager and caretaker. “How do I put it?

Just to hear his voice, to hear him play—and Scott’s photography—it was just ethereal to me.”

Since its debut, Sidemen has been shown at more than two dozen film and music festivals, including Bonnaroo and Glastonbury, as the indefatigable Mr. Rosenbaum has fought for funding, for distribution and to keep dying promises to three old men.

“From the beginning, I could feel this guy’s mission,” Mr. Sharrard says. “Even just talking to him on the phone, I could feel the mission in his voice.”

Sidemen has consumed Mr. Rosenbaum’s 40s, his creativity and about $150,000 of his bank account, leaving hairline cracks in his sanity. He is the director. He is a cowriter and co-producer. He is the principal photographer, sound guy, lighting guy, researcher, interviewer, fact checker, financier, marketer—hell, even caterer. He’s traveled the planet, first to shoot the film and then to promote it and screen it, talking with dozens and dozens of musicians over four years as well as the bluesmen’s families,

acquaintances, agents and managers. He even helped book, put on and finance the four concerts featured in the film—they cost about $60,000—once sitting in on drums during a performance of “Built For Comfort,” a Howlin’ Wolf song.

But through all of it, Mr. Rosenbaum became friends with Mr. Perkins, Mr. Smith and Mr. Sumlin. He accompanied them to the Grammys and stayed up with them in hotels after gigs, talking blues and telling stories all night. Mr. Smith hugged Mr. Rosenbaum whenever they met, and by the end, Mr. Rosenbaum visited Mr. Sumlin in the hospital and stood graveside at Mr. Perkins’s funeral.

“We had some pretty incredible experiences over a short period of time,” Mr. Rosenbaum says. “It was just a moment in time that I’ll never forget. It was just one of those times when the universe opens up and you know you’re in the middle of something unique and special, and you’re enjoying it.

And then, it was gone.”

The sideman, in the argot of musicians, is a guy who backs the guy. Some guys transcend

PERKINS: JEROME BRUNE T / SUMLIN: SANDRO MILLER

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Pinetop Perkins, Hubert Sumlin, Willie “Big Eyes” Smith

JEROME BRUNE T / LIBER T Y BELL : iS TOCK .COM/ORDERFINISHEDAR T

from left

the label that can be a pejorative to tetchier musicians, but it’s rare. Jimmy Page started as a studio guitarist before becoming his own entity in Led Zeppelin, cultivating a star value equal to that of frontman Robert Plant.

Similarly, Keith Richards would probably object if someone called him Mick Jagger’s sideman.

Mr. Page and Mr. Richards are exceptions.

Willie Smith, Pinetop Perkins and Hubert Sumlin are the rule.

“They’re always the reality of any kind of music,” says Elijah Wald, a blues and folk musician and historian who authored, among other books, Escaping the Delta (HarperCollins, 2004), which uses legendary Delta bluesman Robert Johnson as an entrée to blues history. “I mean, the names that you know are the handful of front people, but the music that people were actually listening to and dancing to was the music of the sidemen.

The sidemen are the reality of any scene.

The front people are just the people who are remembered and collect the checks.”

Of the three blues musicians Scott Rosenbaum profiles in his documentary, Sidemen: Long Road to Glory, Mr. Sumlin is the most acclaimed—

Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards paid for his funeral—and he came the closest to breaking out of the sideman caste.

Ultimately, though, his quiet disposition and lifelong reliance on others, notably Howlin’ Wolf, to survive day to day held him back.

“He was so sweet,” Mr. Rosenbaum says. “It was like sitting with your grandfather.”

Mr. Sumlin joined Howlin’ Wolf’s band—known for its pure, rhythmic power, one-chord songs and treating every instrument like a drum—as its lead guitarist in 1955. He developed a father-son relationship with the man who was born Chester Burnett and died at age 65 in 1976, and between 1955 and then, Mr. Sumlin would conjure the riffs to some of Wolf’s most iconic songs, especially “Killing Floor” and “Smokestack Lightnin’.”

Jimi Hendrix made a frenetic cover of “Killing Floor” a mainstay of his live sets, and “Smokestack Lightnin’” is a blues standard thanks to a dark and smooth driving Sumlin riff that’s as virile as any finger-picked by man or god. That’s probably why Viagra featured the song in a 2011 commercial.

In Sidemen, Bonnie Raitt says that Mr. Sumlin’s guitar solo in “Three Hundred Pounds of Joy” may be the greatest ever.

“Hubert Sumlin, he was the key man in the Howlin’ Wolf band, which is one of the greatest bands in the history of electric blues,” Mr. Wald says. “One of the things that’s tricky about that is that it was not a band about instrumental soloists. It was a band about backing Wolf and just having this incredibly funky, joint-rhythmic attack—and Sumlin, he was the key guy.”

Neither Mr. Perkins nor Mr. Smith, while prolific and members of various iterations of Muddy Waters’s band, are as highly regarded as Mr. Sumlin—although they did win Grammys while Mr. Sumlin came up empty on four nominations. And despite the No. 43 spot on Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Guitarists” list, Mr. Sumlin’s also not in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Campaigns have been and are being waged to change that, but Mr. Perkins and Mr. Smith remain en bloc with the thousands of sidemen wiped faceless by the fat shadows of their

C L A SS NO T ES LLC, Seneca Coal Resources LLC and Seminole Coal Resources LLC. These companies operate metallurgical coal mines in the United States and abroad.

He has practiced law for 32 years in Washington, D.C., as a partner in several large law firms and also worked for the U.S. Senate, Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice.

Paul Ried, MBA ’78, president of Paul R. Ried Financial Group, LLC, in Bellevue, Wash., was named one of America’s Top 200 wealth advisors for 2016 by Forbes.

Ali Eskandarian, BS ’79, PhD ’87, and Jennifer Chub, PhD ’09, authored Logic and Algebraic Structures in Quantum Computing and Information (Cambridge University Press, February 2016), which explores themes ranging from the philosophical examination of the foundations of physics and quantum logic to the exploitation of the methods and structures of operator theory, category theory and knot theory in an effort to gain insight into the fundamental questions in quantum theory and logic.

Chris Formant, MBA ’79, authored Bright Midnight (Astor + Blue, November 2016), a thriller that follows Gantry Elliot, an investigative writer for Rolling Stone and a relic of the rock and roll era, as he uncovers the truth behind the mysterious death of six iconic rock stars.

// 80s Richard Carson, MA ’80, a professor of economics in the University of CaliforniaSan Diego Division of Social Sciences, was named a fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Eric Federing, BA ’82, directed press information center operations at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. This was Mr. Federing’s sixth convention as the press information center operations director and seventh convention in PIC ops management.

Maria Rodriguez, BBA ’82, president and co-founder of the Washington, D.C.-based public relations firm Vanguard Communications, was inducted into the National Capital Public Relations Hall of Fame in September.

Nip Rogers, BA ’83, MFA ’87, held an art show, “A New Hello,” at A Point of View Gallery in Lake Placid, N.Y. The show, which opened in October, featured pages from his personal journals and work from time spent in Malaysia, Kenya and the Adirondacks.

Michael Chua, BS ’85, a bridge engineer, was promoted to senior associate at Dewberry’s Fairfax, Va., office.

Philip Gentry, BA ’85, the dental consultant to GW athletics, was appointed to the dean’s faculty at the University of Maryland School of Dentistry, where he is a clinical assistant professor. He has been in private practice for more than 27 years in Arlington, Va. Steven Wyman, BA ’85, put together “The Confluence of the Corcoran and GW and the Ripples Felt Far Away in Maine,” an art show that will run from May 18 to Oct.

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“We had some pretty incredible experiences over a short period of time.

It was just a moment in time that I’ll never forget. It was just one of those times when

Hubert Sumlin (left) and Howlin’ Wolf in 1964 below Pinetop Perkins and Scott Rosenbaum in 2010 above

the universe opens up and you know you’re in the middle of something unique and special, and you’re it was gone.”

frontmen.

“In a sense, they’re underrated as individuals,” Mr. Wald says. “The work they did? Not so much.”

To get Sidemen: Long Road to Glory funded, made and distributed, it feels like Scott Rosenbaum’s been pushing a snow boulder barefoot up a volcano on the hottest day in July—but it’s also hailing and the snow boulder costs half a million dollars, eight years of your life and the favorite chamber of your heart.

First, the self-taught filmmaker couldn’t make The Last Waltz-style “grand finale” concert film he wanted because he, admittedly, as an upstart industry prole, lacked the directorial and financial prestige to lure the name-brand rock stars he wanted to help him fete Pinetop Perkins, Willie Smith and Hubert Sumlin.

Then those bluesmen all died in 6 4 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

a nine-month span in 2011, leaving Mr. Rosenbaum with a flagging, cash-poor passion film just 40 percent done.

“I think it was almost haunting Scott,” says close friend Jasin Cadic, a Sidemen cowriter and co-producer who is the lead singer of Panzie, a New York-based goth-metal band known for its theatrical live show. “He had promised them that he would tell their story … and Scott was doing this mostly by himself at that point.”

Mr. Rosenbaum’s only formal filmmaking training consists of brief stints working with, first, the late Broadway director Gene Frankel and then Spike Lee. A friend of a friend in the movie business got the script that would be The Perfect Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll into Mr. Lee’s hands. He liked it and took Mr. Rosenbaum to Italy as an assistant during the filming of 2008’s Miracle at St. Anna.

Mr. Rosenbaum quit Wall Street in 2005 after 9/11 inspired him to chase the filmmaking career he’d wanted since age

13 but never had the confidence, support or wherewithal to pursue. He says he knew about dozen people killed in the World Trade Center attacks and that he walked through the towers no less than an hour before the first plane hit.

“I said, ‘I’ve thought about doing this for my whole life, and you know, if something like that doesn’t point out that tomorrow is promised to no one, then nothing will,’” Mr. Rosenbaum says. “So I said, ‘I’m going to write that screenplay that I always wanted to write, even if it’s nothing but toilet paper.’”

In the years after 9/11, Mr. Rosenbaum spent his sunrises writing a screenplay in a downtown New York deli.

Then, at 7:15 a.m., he would go to work as a Wall Street trader at Troster Singer, since absorbed by Goldman Sachs. He was driven by regret and purpose. He still is. It’s just that the purpose comes from somewhere else.

Pinetop Perkins, Willie Smith and Hubert Sumlin are just shy of Greek myths to Mr.

SUMLIN AND HOWLIN’ WOLF: BRIAN SMITH / PERKINS AND ROSNEBAUM: COURTESY SCOT T ROSENBAUM

enjoying it. And then,

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Rosenbaum—Classical heroes given souls by the witching hour pluck of a Mississippi Delta low E string. Magic and mystery are helixed thick in blues history, and even though most of that comes from the self-promotion of the early 20th-century itinerant bluesmen and the hardline-but-mystical Christian religious culture that rejected them, the stories of devil’s music and Faustian bargains remain alluring. They certainly are to Mr. Rosenbaum.

He found the blues just before middle school through the British rock bands who built their sounds on an Americana armature of 12 bars and dominant sevenths. From there, Mr. Rosenbaum reverse engineered what would become a blood-felt reverence for the music and its musicians that went beyond the draw of the darkly embellished histories of Robert Johnson and Skip James.

When Mr. Rosenbaum saw Muddy Waters perform “Mannish Boy”—the impossible-toturn-up-too-loud version off the “Hard Again” album opens Sidemen—in The Last Waltz, Mr. Rosenbaum’s blues devotion clarified.

“I was just blown away,” he says.

As a student of music history and as a musician, Mr. Rosenbaum knew what happened to a lot of older sidemen, not just the ones who played blues. They were ripped off and used, not paid by promoters or bandleaders and thrown out when their frontmen faded, fell away or died. It happened to Mr. Perkins and Mr. Sumlin.

“They would just be living in these housing developments … and people would know that they were there, and they would go in and just steal [stuff],” Mr. Rosenbaum says.

“They were truly babes-in-the-woods-type musicians where the only thing that really had focus in their minds was the art and playing. They couldn’t really manage on a day-to-day basis and they had all kinds of people who either took care of them or took advantage of them, and it was pretty sad.”

Hugh Southard, the owner of Charlottebased Blue Mountain Artists, was the agent of Mr. Perkins, Mr. Smith and Mr. Sumlin and said the musicians, especially Mr. Perkins, were initially suspicious of Mr. Rosenbaum.

Mr. Southard also had questions about Mr. Rosenbaum’s motives, wondering if he was doing it for ego or money. Mr. Rosenbaum’s respect for the bluesmen and drive to make the film, even at great personal expense, proved he wasn’t—and the fact that making an esoteric documentary with no financial backing probably wasn’t the best way to pad a bank account or nurture self-esteem.

“It couldn’t be money or ego,” says Mr.

Southard, who also manages Tim Reynolds, the lead guitarist in the Dave Matthews Band, “because he’s not going to make a lot of money on a documentary, and his ego has been smacked around because of all of this.”

Mr. Cadic also knew Mr. Rosenbaum was not just another guy looking to exploit the fame and name of an old bluesman. And in 2012, when a lack of resources and money got Sidemen stuffed in a box, Mr. Cadic reminded him.

“I think he would’ve felt sad if he didn’t finish the film,” Mr. Cadic says. “And I think these guys entrusted what became the last three years of their lives to him.”

Mr. Cadic rallied Mr. Rosenbaum after the deaths of Mr. Perkins, Mr. Smith and Mr. Sumlin to finish the documentary and came on board as a co-writer and co-producer, joining a crew that also included Tony Grazia, a legit Hollywood producer who worked for Relativity studios and has served as a mentor to Mr. Rosenbaum. Mr. Rosenbaum just calls him the “adult in the room.” They also hired Bo Mehrad as editor and then went about making the missing 60 percent in real time, doing research and traveling to film interviews. They landed Marc Maron—who they knew, as fans of Mr. Maron’s WTF podcast, loves the blues—to narrate and they got most of Mr. Rosenbaum’s rock star interview wish list. They filled in the blanks with archival footage when they couldn’t make it work with rock ‘n’ roll royalty like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, and paid for the footage as well as the licensing fees for the documentary’s music with a $225,000 Kickstarter campaign.

The final distribution details are still being worked out for Sidemen, but Mr. Rosenbaum says the film will be out in late summer or early fall.

“This is a relatively short journey, although it feels long to me,” Mr. Rosenbaum says of the eight years he’s put into Sidemen, during which he’s made money by directing commercials.

(His wife, Elyssa, owns Revival Boutique, a vintage clothing store on Long Island.) “But compared to their five, six, seven decades in the music business getting kicked, being disrespected, not getting paid and all the slights they’ve suffered, it’s not.”

The three-hour conversation is about done.

Mr. Rosenbaum’s third-floor office, standing half a block from the site of two razed Madison Square Gardens, is dark and empty now. He’s still sitting like a drummer in the terrarium swivel chair and drinking coffee. He says don’t worry about all this taking so long.

“No, it’s all good, man. I don’t mind. It’s kind of cathartic.”

C L A SS NO T ES 15 at Thos. Moser in Freeport, Maine. The show features the work of Corcoran and GW graduates and teachers who have spent time in Maine and may have taught or learned at one of the state’s seasonal art schools. The show also includes Maine artists who showed work at the Corcoran.

David Poyer, BA ’86, authored Onslaught: The War with China—The Opening Battle (St. Martin’s Press, December 2016), a novel. The most recent entry in a longrunning series, it chronicles Capt. Dan Lenson’s latest challenge as the U.S. Navy struggles to hold Taiwan, Korea and Japan against a massive Chinese offensive and prevent the country’s domination of Asia and the Western Pacific.

Lisa Darsonval-Amador, BAccy ’87, is the founder of Santa Barbara Matchmaking, a discreet, upscale dating service in California. The company offers matchmaking, date-coaching and events for attractive, successful, commitmentminded singles who are “great catches” and able to be very selective about whom they date but have not found a match through conventional dating.

Randolph E. Gross, BA ’87, completed his PhD in nursing science at the City University of New York Graduate Center in New York City. His dissertation, “Warmth & Competence Traits: Perceptions of Female and Male Nurse Stereotypes,” examined the stereotypes and major barriers to the recruitment of intelligent and compassionate women and men into the nursing field.

David Hildebrand, PhD ’87, was one of 17 scholars awarded a three-month residential fellowship for the 2016-17 academic year at Mount Vernon’s Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington. His research topic is titled “Interpreting Washington through Music: Continued Studies of Sources and Applications.”

Camille W. Hill, JD ’88, of Bond, Schoeneck & King PLLC, was recognized in the 2017 edition of The Best Lawyers in America.

She specializes in commercial bankruptcy and reorganizations, creditors’ rights, and banking and commercial transactions.

Michael DeWitt, BA ’89, was appointed senior vice president and regional director of the Community Preservation Corporation, a nonprofit specializing in lending to multifamily projects that revitalize neighborhoods. He will head the Buffalo, N.Y., office.

Lori Sheerin, MA Ed ’89, launched Autism Services of Southern Colorado in June 2016. The agency provides DIR/IDI PLAY Project Autism therapy. Other services include early intervention, developmental therapy, consultation and advocacy.

Alan G. Petersen, MFS ’89, a crime scene analyst with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, received an associate’s degree in commercial photography and a certificate in fire investigation from the College of Southern Nevada. He also became a certified forensic photographer

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[celebrations]

Happy Birthday, George

Since 2010, alums across the planet have celebrated George Washington’s birthday.

Here’s a by-the-numbers look at George’s big day in 2017.

George—surveyor, general, president, cherry tree enthusiast—was born Feb. 22, 1732, so he just turned 285.

More than 1,500 alums in seven countries threw birthday bashes for the university’s namesake. The countries: the United States, Brazil, China, India, Japan, Kazakhstan and the United Kingdom.

The celebration spanned 38 cities, 30 domestic and eight abroad, notably Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, Hong Kong, London, Shanghai and Tokyo.

6 6 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

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C L A SS NO T ES

The President’s Farewell

with the International Association for Identification.

Jeremy Gosbee, BA ’98, MBA ’02, looks back on his term

Fellow GW Alumni, It’s hard to imagine, but, in a few short weeks, my term as president of the GW Alumni Association will come to an end. As we approach this leadership transition, I thought I’d share a few of our recent accomplishments.

We created the Colonials Helping Colonials Fund, a $100,000 endowment that will provide financial support to GW students pursuing unpaid internships. For more information, check out go.gwu.edu/kacifapp.

We created an outreach program that encourages GWAA board members to make one-on-one connections with students and graduates in an effort to foster greater involvement with alumni and the university.

We have adopted board resolutions to speak out on behalf of our alumni community (giving grads a bigger voice on campus) and to recognize accomplishments across the university. Recently, the GWAA advocated on campus for mental-health services and the Veterans Community Center.

PLEASE JOIN US

// 90s

DATE

Donna Balaguer, BA ’91, principal at Fish & Richardson in Washington, D.C., was named a “Cybersecurity & Data Privacy Trailblazer” by The National Law Journal.

GWAA ANNUAL MEETING Thursday, June 8, 2017 TIME

6:30-9 p.m.

PLACE

Elliott School of International Affairs, City View Room 1957 E St. NW Washington, D.C., 20052 REFRESHMENTS

Yes

FOR MORE INFORMATION

alumni.gwu.edu/ events

We streamlined the GWAA Grant Program, which provides $30,000 in annual support to campus departments and student organizations looking to create connections with alumni and fund reunion events. For more information, check out go.gwu.edu/gwaagrant.

G O S B E E : W I L L I A M AT K I N S / P O L I C E TA P E : i S T O C K . C O M /J AY S O N P H O T O G R A P H Y

We have continued to recognize accomplished and dedicated alumni through our Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award and Alumni Outstanding Service Awards. In 2016, we honored, among others, Baroness Joanna Shields (the U.K. Minister for Internet Safety and Security), Metropolitan Museum of Art President Daniel Weiss and U.S. Army Surgeon General Nadja West. It was the 80th year of the awards.

Your alumni association has been working hard to build a worldwide alumni community, to give it a voice and to develop a culture of philanthropy. All this work was done by volunteer members of the GWAA board of directors—a group of talented and dedicated alumni that I’m tremendously pleased to have worked with these past two years. I thank each of them for all they’ve contributed on your behalf.

At our upcoming annual meeting, I will pass the gavel to my successor, Venessa Perry, MPH ’99, but I’ll remain on the GWAA board for one more year as immediate past president.

I look forward to Venessa’s leadership and I hope you’ll join me in supporting her.

Serving as president of your alumni association has been my great honor and pleasure. We often say that this is an exciting time at GW, but I can’t help but feel this is especially true today. We have so much to look forward to in the years to come: the arrival of a new president this summer, a bicentennial celebration in 2021, and each year, another group of outstanding GW graduates that will join our worldwide alumni community, now nearly 280,000-strong.

Thank you for your support of our alma mater and your fellow Colonials.

With best wishes, Jeremy Gosbee, BA ’98, MBA ’02 GW Alumni Association president

Liliane Blom, BA ’91, a digital painter and installation artist, opened “Pink—A Cherry Blossom Fantasy,” a 2,500-square-foot installation, on Dec. 2 at Visarts in Rockville, Md. The show was recognized on ChristiesRealEstate. com and CultureSpotMC.com. For more information, visit LilianeBlom.com.

Ed Moser, MA ’91, authored The Two-Term Jinx: Why Most Second-Term Presidents Stumble, and How Some Succeed (CreateSpace, March 2016). The book— which is volume one—is an account of the presidencies of two-term chief executives from George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt. It details how most twotermers have had unsuccessful or unlucky second terms.

Brian Steuber, BAccy ’92, was admitted as a partner at Moss Adams LLP in Silicon Valley, Calif.

Patricia Barrera, MA ’93, is a victim services specialist at the Portland Police Bureau and works on cold sexual assault cases. The position is the result of the national Sexual Assault Initiative, a grant program intended to address the growing number of sexual assault kits in law-enforcement custody and to provide resolutions for victims.

Adam Low, BBA ’93, was appointed chief revenue officer of Athletico Physical Therapy in Oak Brook, Ill. Shirl Hendley, MS ’94, of Chesapeake Beach, Md., was elected to the American Legion Auxiliary Foundation’s board of directors during the ALA’s 96th national convention, which was held in Cincinnati from Aug. 26 to Sept. 1. The ALA is a women’s patriotic service organization.

Ms. Hendley will serve a three-year term.

Max Klau, BA ’94, is the chief program officer at the New Politics Leadership Academy, a non-partisan, nonprofit organization focused on recruiting and training alumni of service programs—like the Peace Corps—to run for political office.

Mr. Klau’s first book, Race and Social Change: A Quest, A Study, A Call to Action (Jossey-Bass, March 2017), analyzes the dynamics of race and social change by using social science and empiricism.

Paul C. Harris, JD ’95, a former Virginia legislator—he was the first black Republican elected to the General Assembly since 1891—and senior Justice Department official, was appointed senior vice president at Hampton University (Va.).

Darren V. Roman, JD ’96, joined Snell & Wilmer’s Orange County, Calif., office as counsel in its commercial finance group.

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CLASS NOTES Kiki McGrath, MA ’97, held an art show in February at the Studio Gallery in Washington, D.C. The exhibition, “Aerial Roots,” was based on the Japanese art of flower arranging and explored the relationship between painting and sculpture. Ms. McGrath is a curator at the Wesley Theological Seminary, also in D.C. Rishi Nangia, BA ’97, BS ’97, launched Syde, a daily fantasy sports mobile app that lets sports fans pit athletes against each other in pre-selected one-on-one matchups. It takes less than 10 seconds, doesn’t require drafting a team and pays cash if you win.

Calvin K. Woo, JD ’98, an attorney at Verrill Dana in Westport, Conn., was recognized in the 2016 edition of New England Super Lawyers and Rising Stars for his work in business litigation.

[scholarships]

One for the Rhodes

J E A N L A C H AT

Alumnus prepares to head to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar // By Kurtis Hiatt At 22, Josh Pickar has graduated early from high school, blitzed through GW in two years and is in his final year of law school at the University of Chicago. Service trips abroad, fluency in a handful of languages and academic honors fill his résumé. Now he’ll need to find room for one more: Rhodes Scholar.

In November, Mr. Pickar, BA ’14, was among the 32 men and women in the U.S.—and just the second ever with a GW affiliation—selected for the prestigious scholarship, which covers all expenses to study at the University of Oxford in England.

When he arrives in the fall, he plans to pursue a Master of Philosophy degree in international relations.

At GW, Mr. Pickar majored in international affairs with a concentration in security policy. He picked up practical insight as an intern in then-U.S. Sen. John Kerry’s office, where he researched environmental policy and racial discrimination.

“It was the first time that I really got to work in policy and understand how what you’re studying affects the real world, and it was just a really useful experience,” says Mr. Pickar, a Lexington, Mass., native.

He studied at GW Law for a year before transferring to the University of Chicago.

There, he has worked with the International Refugee Assistance Project, advocating successfully for an LGBT Iraqi refugee’s relocation to the U.S., after the refugee was assaulted by his family and exiled. He was granted asylum in August.

Mr. Pickar speaks fluent Russian, French and Spanish, and he’s learning German, Italian and Arabic, translating an initial interest in grammar and the systems of language into a means for understanding other cultures.

“In order to be an effective policy or lawmaker, you have to be able to communicate with other people,” he says.

“So I hope to be able to use languages to work on international treaties or negotiation and better understand why different countries feel a certain way about policies from the U.S.” He dreams, someday, of applying all this as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations or as secretary of state.

“Lofty goals,” he says.

But first, finishing law school, passing the bar exam and packing for Oxford.

Heath Brown, MA ’99, PhD ’05, authored Immigrants and Electoral Politics (Cornell University Press, November 2016), which explores the voting behavior and power of immigrants as well as the role of immigrant-serving nonprofit organizations in electoral politics. Dr. Brown is an assistant professor of public policy at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the City University of New York.

Kim Gatling, JD ’99, a partner at Smith Moore Leatherwood and based in the firm’s Greensboro, N.C., office, was elected to the North Carolina Humanities Council. She will serve a three-year term.

AnnaLisa Nash, BA ’99, the North Dakota manager of Global Trade and Compliance for Bobcat/Doosan, was selected as one of Prairie Business magazine’s top 40 business professionals under 40.

// 00s Juan Carlos Flamand, BA ’00, JD ’03, joined Hammond Law Group, PLLC, where he will manage the firm’s Phoenix office.

He represents employers and foreign nationals in immigration matters.

Andrew Kaver, BA ’00, joined the Los Angeles office of DR Welch. Mr. Kaver specializes in business transactions for the firm’s clients, which include government officials, municipalities and marijuana dispensaries.

Kevin Rubin, BBA ’00, MS ’01, was named a partner at Boyd Collar Nolen & Tuggle, a divorce and family law firm in Atlanta.

Soneyet Muhammad, BBA ’02, is the director of education at Clarifi, a nonprofit devoted to providing financial-consulting services to low-income families throughout the Greater Delaware Valley.

Kurt M. Saunders, LLM ’02, a professor of business law at California State University, authored Intellectual Property Law: Legal Aspects of Innovation and Competition (West Academic, May 2016). The textbook covers the principal areas of intellectual property protection: trade secrets, patents, copyrights, trademarks and the right of publicity as well as treatment of legal protection for other valuable intangibles and international intellectual property issues.

Darin Early, BBA ’03, is president of the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation, a quasi-government agency that invests

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I AM ADVANCING THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

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Support students like Erjon by making your annual gift today.

- Erjon Baballari, GWSB ’18

campaign.gwu.edu/students

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[health]

A Vision of the Future Alumna Shilpa Rose is helping to make reading glasses obsolete. // By Andrew Faught Every year, millions of Americans embark on a middle-age rite of passage: buying their first pair of reading glasses.

Around age 40, lenses of the human eyes harden, while ocular muscles lose elasticity.

“The first thing you notice is it’s hard to focus on things close up: medicine bottles, the computer screen, your phone, texts,” says Shilpa Rose, BA ’92, MD ’96, RES ’00, an ophthalmologist with Eye Associates of Washington, D.C., and Whitten Laser Eye. “You pull your arm away, and eventually your arm isn’t long enough.”

Fortunately, relief is in sight.

Dr. Rose is among the first doctors to perform a new treatment for farsightedness—or presbyopia—called the Raindrop Near Vision Inlay, a surgery recently developed

by ReVision Optics, Inc., a privately held corporation in Southern California.

Since the FDA approved the procedure in June 2016, Dr. Rose and colleague Mark Whitten (who in 1999 gained fame when he performed another laser eye surgery, LASIK, on golfer Tiger Woods) have performed about 50 Raindrop procedures, and surgeons across the country have performed more than a thousand.

The 10-minute operation involves inserting an implant into the corneal stroma—the fibrous, transparent portion above the pupil—of a person’s non-dominant eye. The implant is two millimeters thick.

With the Raindrop procedure, doctors use a laser to create a flap in the cornea, under which the implant, made of 80 percent water and a gel base, is laid. The implant, which resembles a contact lens, doesn’t restore 20/20 vision, but the FDA reports that 92 percent of patients are able to see with 20/40 vision or better at near distances after the operation.

“Given the prevalence of presbyopia and the aging of the Baby Boomer population, the need for near-vision correction will likely rise in the coming years,” William Maisel, deputy director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said last year.

Dr. Rose completed her ophthalmology

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residency at GW Hospital in 2000, and she’s worked in the field ever since. She was born in India but grew up in Bowie, Md., after her parents immigrated to the United States in 1967. The Raindrop Inlay is the biggest development since LASIK was introduced in the late 1990s, Dr. Rose says. That procedure rids patients of astigmatism, an imperfection in the curvature of the cornea that can make objects both near and far appear blurry and distorted.

“We really haven’t had anything, up until now, to help us with reading,” Dr. Rose says of the Raindrop. “It’s a safe, relatively easy procedure to get rid of reading glasses.

“All of our patients are reading immediately, as in five minutes after the procedure,” she adds. “It could take up to three months to really see the final effects, but patients are getting off the table and reading things that they haven’t read before.”

During FDA trials, 373 patients received Raindrop implants. Only four were removed, after patients complained of hazy vision.

To help prevent scarring and rejection by the body, patients are administered three months of steroid drops, Dr. Rose says.

But as people age and the lenses of the eyes continue to harden, patients could ultimately develop cataracts, which would require doctors to remove the lense inside the eye and perform cataract surgery, Dr. Rose says. The Raindrop Inlay, however, can stay in place.

Dr. Rose and Dr. Whitten are the only doctors performing the surgery in Washington, D.C., and, Dr. Rose says, insurance companies do not cover the procedure, which costs between $3,500 and $5,500.

“My passion is talking to patients and counseling them and educating them,” she says of her work. “It’s really exciting to see how people’s lives change. I’m excited to be part of something new, innovative and safe.”

1

2

1) A laser creates flap in the cornea.

2) The Raindrop insert is placed under the flap.

CLASS NOTES taxpayer dollars in the state to grow the economy by luring businesses and real estate development.

Tricia Parker, BA ’03, was named a staff writer at New Eastside News in Chicago and a copy editor at Schiffer Publishing. A book she edited, Leadership Dubai Style, was selected by Emirates Airline as one of its 10 featured in-flight audiobooks.

Christopher Wyrod, MA ’03, was appointed deputy country representative for the Asia Foundation in Indonesia after completing six years of service with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

Conor Yunits, BA ’03, joined the public relations agency Solomon McCown as vice president. Mr. Yunits handles government affairs accounts, issues management and crisis work. Solomon McCown has offices in New York and Boston.

Eric R. Daleo, BA ’04, was named assistant executive director of New Jersey Transit, where he leads the Capital Planning and Programs Department and oversees staff charged with planning, project management, construction management, grant administration and compliance, local programs and budgeting responsibilities.

Shirley Neely McCulloch, CERT ’04, is a volunteer with the Global Health Service Partnership, which works with the Peace Corps to place U.S. health professionals alongside local counterparts to improve the quality of medical and nursing education. Previously, she worked as a midwife lecturer at Southern Africa Nazarene University in Manzini, Swaziland.

Mathew J. Todaro, BA ’04, was one of 14 Verrill Dana attorneys honored at the 2016 Maine Supreme Judicial Court Katahdin Council Recognition event at the Cumberland County Courthouse in Portland, Maine. The recognition is for attorneys who completed 50 hours or more of pro bono service.

David Zhang, BA ’05, JD ’09, was named partner at Ropes & Gray’s Shanghai office. He advises clients on internal investigations, due diligence and compliance programs, with a focus on anti-corruption and anti-bribery matters in China.

Joanie Twersky, BA ’06, was selected as part of LEAD Atlanta’s 2017 cohort. LEAD Atlanta is an eight-month leadership development and community education program targeted at young professionals in metro Atlanta. Ms. Twersky is the senior marketing manager at AT&T Foundry.

Tara L. Pellerito, BA ’07, MS ’16, and Jess M. Boyle, BS ’16, were married on Oct. 14, 2016. They live and work in New York.

James P. Youngs, JD ’07, was selected as an Upstate New York Super Lawyer Rising Star for 2016. Mr. Youngs is an associate at Hancock Estabrook, LLP. Darren E. Tromblay, MA ’07, coauthored Securing U.S. Innovation: The Challenge of Preserving a Competitive Advantage in the Creation of Knowledge (Rowman & Littlefield, August 2016). Mr. Tromblay, a strategic intelligence analyst with the FBI, also authored The U.S. Domestic Intelligence Enterprise: History, Development, and Operations (Taylor & Francis, August 2015).

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[Books]

Indelible Ink A new book pays homage to chefs’ tattoos. // By Ruth Steinhardt

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W ENDY MACNAUGHTON, COUR TE SY BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING

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ot everyone would choose to celebrate their chosen profession with a massive tattoo of a boar fighting an octopus. But one chef, wanting to “represent one of the classic food combinations: surf and turf,” did just that.

His is one of dozens of stories in Knives & Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their

Tattoos (Bloomsbury, October 2016), a compendium of cooks’ body art assembled by Isaac Fitzgerald, BA ’05, and illustrated by San Francisco artist Wendy MacNaughton.

“Working in a kitchen is hard. You get burned and scarred, you mess up and hurt yourself—it’s not for the weak of heart,” Mr. Fitzgerald says.

A tattoo, he suggests, can

C L A SS NO T ES Jamie O. Bosket, MA ’08, was named president and CEO of the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, Va. He formerly served as vice president for guest experience at Mount Vernon.

April Michelle Davis, MPS ’08, authored A Princess in Disguise (Iguana Books, August 2016), a YA novel that follows Princess Margaret, who, on the night of her 16th birthday, runs away before having to marry a stranger and goes on a soulsearching quest.

Frida Matute, BA ’08, founded Indy Talk Shop, an educational toy company that is launching its first product: a playbox for children aged 18 to 36 months. The toy pairs original stories with an interactive play experience. For more information on the playbox and its Kickstarter, visit www.

IndyTalkShop.com.

Patti Kelly Ralabate, EdD ’08, authored Your UDL Lesson Planner: The Step-byStep Guide for Teaching All Learners (Brookes Publishing, January 2016), which introduces educators to an instructional design framework—universal design for learning (UDL)—that’s based on neuroscience.

Gary Nuzzi Jr., BA ’08, and Megan Whittemore, BA ’08, MPS ’10, were married Nov. 12, 2016, at the Arts Club of Washington. Mr. Nuzzi is the vice president at Adfero, a communications firm, and Ms. Whittemore is the communications director for U.S. Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.).

Davie Yarborough, BA ’08, MEd ’10, joined The Pennington School in Pennington, N.J., where she teaches communications skills and English.

Jenny Abreu, MTA ’09, celebrated two years as founder and chief experience officer of Forever Etched Events, LLC, a boutique meeting and event planning and production firm based in Washington, D.C.

W ENDY MACNAUGHTON, COUR TE SY BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING

Bethany Lee Crudele, BA ’09, and John Darryl Jones Jr. were married Aug. 12, 2016, in Atlanta. Ms. Crudele is a writer and producer for “CNN Newsroom” with Carol Costello. Mr. Jones is a sales representative with Momar Inc., a specialty manufacturer of general maintenance and sanitation chemicals.

Michael M. Denci, BA ’09, an associate at Thompson & Knight, was recognized in the 2016 edition of New York Metro Rising Stars.

Emily Geise, BA ’08, and Blade Smith, BA ’09, were married Oct. 22, 2016, in Easton, Md.

// 10s Chris Hickman, PhD ’10, Michael Todd Landis, PhD ’11, and Patrick Funiciello, PhD ’15, are professors at Tarleton State University, a member of the Texas A&M system, in Stephenville, Texas.

Laura Rocklyn, MFA ’10, played the Ghost of Christmas Past in a stage production of A Christmas Carol at the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company in Baltimore.

Abby Whalen, BA ’10, had her article “A Temporary Taming of the Wild West” published in the summer edition of Great Plains Quarterly.

Chrishon McManus, BA ’11, and Claire

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symbolize acceptance of, ownership over, or even a form of collaboration with that pain. And ink can also be a kind of password, a permanent visible distinction that sets its wearer apart as a member of the brotherhood of chefs.

“It’s almost a way of saying, ‘I’m not going to the front of the house,’” Mr. Fitzgerald says, using the industry term for the dining area, where waiters and hosts are more likely to be held to the aesthetic preferences of the customer. A visible tattoo, he says, declares, “‘I’m dedicating myself to being back here [in the kitchen].’”

Basically, he says with a laugh, “Chefs are badasses.”

Mr. Fitzgerald, now editor of BuzzFeed Books, has long been fascinated with tattoos.

When he was a sophomore in high school, an adviser promised him and a group of friends that he would pay for their first tattoo if they graduated high school. Mr. Fitzgerald was the only one of the group to graduate, and the adviser paid up. Mr. Fitzgerald opted for a Celtic tree of life inside a tribal sun on his right shoulder.

It came out looking more like the SpiderMan symbol, he says, but its significance outweighs its visual drawbacks. “It ain’t cute,” he admits. “But I’ll never cover it.”

Mr. Fitzgerald traces the beginning of his interest in chefs’ ink to his time working at a San Francisco bar. There, during quiet daylight hours, he remembered gathering stories from his colleagues in the front and back of the house to kill time.

It was a skill he would put to use for Knives & Ink, the second published collaboration between him and Ms. MacNaughton. Mr. Fitzgerald first encountered Ms. MacNaughton’s work at online culture magazine The Rumpus, where he was managing editor. He was particularly taken with her series “Meanwhile in San Francisco,” which featured quick, evocative sketches of characters she encountered, accompanied by their own words.

The two discovered a shared fascination with tattoos. Their first project together was a blog that collected readers’ stories and photos of their own ink, which Mr. Fitzgerald curated and Ms. MacNaughton illustrated. The collection became their first book, Pen & Ink (Bloomsbury, October 2014).

When publishers asked them to do a second book, Mr. Fitzgerald and Ms. MacNaughton agreed that they wanted to do more than simply repeating the process: “It was important to us that it not 74 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

just be 2 Pen, 2 Ink,” Mr. Fitzgerald says.

Alongside “Meanwhile in San Francisco,” Ms. MacNaughton had also worked on a project illustrating bars in San Francisco’s Mission district. Remembering his own time sharing tattoo stories in bars and restaurants, Mr. Fitzgerald thought that chefs might be the perfect subject for the duo’s next joint venture.

But this time around, they found they would have to do a little more digging than simply asking the Internet for submissions. “Chefs aren’t just hanging out on [social networking sites],” Mr. Fitzgerald says.

Knowing that cooks’ schedules could be erratic and their downtimes few and far between, he adapted his story-collecting technique to suit their needs. He reached out to cooks he knew and used his contacts in the industry to arrange interviews with friends of friends.

Sometimes, he would be in the room with his subjects. Other times, chefs texted him tattoo stories and photographs when they were on their cigarette breaks.

“It’s about respecting people’s time,” he says.

“These are people who, when they make food, are working on their art.”

Like its predecessor, Knives & Ink is illustrated not by photographs but

by Ms. MacNaughton’s lively, graceful drawings. Her work, Mr. Fitzgerald says, puts both books in a unique, almost “alchemical” position: forms of art interpreting and paying homage to other forms of art.

“It’s Wendy’s art representing the tattoo artist’s art representing the chef’s art,” he says.

The two plan to work together again, though their next project is not yet settled. For the moment, Mr. Fitzgerald is focusing on his upcoming young adult novel, Confessions of a Former Former Fat Kid, adapted from an autobiographical essay he wrote for BuzzFeed in 2016. In his young self’s complicated relationship with his body, Mr. Fitzgerald sees an echo of the reasons he and his subjects have gotten tattoos.

“It’s about walking down that path” to selfacceptance, he says.

W ENDY MACNAUGHTON, COUR TE SY BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING

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C L A SS NO T ES Hepper, BS ’12, were married Aug. 13, 2016.

Tracy Neal, MS ’11, in August, was interviewed on Atlanta Business Radio.

Ms. Neal has two companies (Tracy Neal & Company and TrustIntellect) and a nonprofit, which helps single-parent entrepreneurs.

He wanted two prominent Iranian Americans to take the stage in case he won. He wanted us to … demonstrate the other side of what immigrants can bring to the country.

Corinne Spychala, BAccy ’11, married Tyler Jones on June 11, 2016, in Buffalo, N.Y. David V. Baxter, MA ’12, and his wife, Lori Baxter, welcomed their first child, a son, Noe Owen, on June 21, 2016. Mr. Baxter and his wife finished a one-year assignment directing a medical clinic in remote southern Belize and will be relocating to Laos in September for an initial two-year assignment with Handicap International.

Mary P. Moore, JD ’12, an associate in Bond, Schoeneck & King’s Rochester, N.Y., office, was recognized on the 2016 Upstate New York Super Lawyers Rising Stars list, in the field of business litigation.

—Anousheh Ansari, MS ’92, explaining to Dallas-based D Magazine how she ended up on stage at the Academy Awards on Feb. 26, accepting the Oscar for best foreign-language film on behalf of Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi. The director of The Salesman boycotted the event in response to President Donald Trump’s initial executive order restricting travel from seven majority-Muslim countries. Ms. Ansari, the CEO of Prodea Systems, in 2006 became the first Iranian and first Muslim woman in space. She appeared alongside former NASA scientist Firouz Naderi and read a statement by Mr. Farhadi. “Dividing the world into the ‘us’ and ‘our enemies’ categories creates fear,” she read aloud, “a deceitful justification for aggression and war.”

UPCOMING EVENTS OPEN TO ALL ALUMNI

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APRIL WASHINGTON, D.C.

Children’s author Hena Khan, MA ’97, shares her experiences writing books that represent American Muslims and promote religious and cultural understanding

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Adam Shores, MPS ’12, was appointed to the Grayslake (Ill.) Village board of trustees. He will serve the remainder of an unexpired term and will run for election to a full four-year term in April 2017.

Katie Weigel, MA ’12, and Nick Pettet, MA ’14, were married June 25, 2016.

Kevin Alan Brown, MFA ’14, played the Ghost of Christmas Present and the Ghost of Christmas Yet-To-Come in a stage of production of A Christmas Carol at the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company in Baltimore.

Tessa Larson, MA ’15, was a part of a four-woman group that canoed from Northeast Minnesota to the Hudson Bay in Canada, creating artwork along the way for a research project. The trip, dubbed “Journey 4 Renewal,” also was a mission to raise money for Grand Marais, Minn.’s Wilderness Canoe Base, part of the Lake Wapogasset Lutheran Bible Camp.

Michelle Manikkam, BS ’15, a recipient of the National Institutes of Health Postbaccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award, presented on the work done on the high-throughput screening team in the Tuberculosis Research Section. She emphasized the declining efficacy of the current treatment regimen due to drug resistance and the gravity of tuberculosis’ impact across the globe.

Oscar Lopez, JD ’16, joined Polsinelli as an associate in the national firm’s Phoenix office. Mr. Lopez will practice in the corporate and transactions area.

JUNE NATIONWIDE

GW Out and Allied Alumni Network celebrates LGBT Pride at gathering in various cities. For more: go.gwu.edu/ gwcelebratespride17

For more on these events and others, visit

alumni.gwu.edu/events

AND WHAT ABOUT YOU? Submit your own class note, book or Artists’ Quarter update:

email magazine@gwu.edu mail Alumni News Section GW Magazine 2121 Eye Street, NW Suite 501 Washington, DC 20052

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it’s a whole different ballgame. At the state level, you’re dealing with state issues. When you get to Congress, you’re dealing with, not only the United States—which is the most powerful country in the world economically and militarily—you’re dealing with all the nations and also dealing with world problems, international and foreign relations, and everything from committees on China to Asia to Russia. I mean, it’s just immense information. But it’s very stimulating and intellectually interesting.

A Stearns Talking To Former U.S. representative talks about politics and his other, very exclusive alumni association Cliff Stearns, BS ’63, spent 24 years in the House of Representatives, sponsoring 292 bills and leading high-profile investigations into Planned Parenthood’s financials and a half-billion-dollar Obama administration deal with failed solar-technology company Solyndra.

But after leaving Congress in January 2013—Ted Yoho defeated him in a primary—the conservative Republican from Florida’s 6th district is staying involved.

He immediately joined the U.S. Association for Former Members of Congress, and in July, started a two-year term as president of the alumni organization, which is joined voluntarily and costs $250 in yearly dues.

Mr. Stearns, whose book Life in the Marble Palace: In Praise of Folly came out in November, chatted with GW Magazine, offering insight on Congress and American politics. The interview has been edited for space and clarity.

On the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress: We have about 500 [former] House members and 100 senators as members, and its mission 7 6 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

is to use the expertise the former members have to help educate the public, including college and high school students, and also to work in ways to start discussions and forums about civic responsibility and the importance of our Constitution and our Bill of Rights.

On the USAFMC being bipartisan: Everybody does not bring his particular ideology. They bring a willingness to listen and to compromise … for the purpose of a bigger goal. So you’re saying, “Why don’t you have that in Congress?” Well, you have to get elected every two years, and the way Congress has been structured, and with the internet and immense amounts of information—there’s huge amount of partisanship and there is rankling about things that should be thought out and passed.

On how gerrymandering undercuts bipartisanship: When a person runs for Congress, almost 95 percent of them get reelected because they just vote a certain way. They’re going to get reelected, so it’s probably, out of 435 [House seats], there’s probably only about 30 congressional districts, possibly 40, that are, shall we say, swing districts. … And so that makes it that Republicans continue to hew to the Republican line and Democrats hew to the Democratic line.

On just how hard it is to be a congressman: There’s so much you have to learn. I’ve had state senators that once they get to the federal level,

On why Donald Trump won: I think Trump’s message was “If you’re fed up with Washington and you want change and you want somebody that’s been successful in his business, you should elect me.” And Secretary of State Clinton’s message was “We’re all family, let’s be together, let’s get along, and I’ll bring everybody together.”

And for people out here, a lot of the real estate has not come back from the 2007 [recession]. A lot of people are working two jobs. There are a lot of people who are scared and there’s not the high level of manufacturing jobs anymore. So I think Trump’s message—forgetting his personality or forgetting the things that came out during the campaign— his message about change and “I’m gonna change it, I’m gonna shake things up” appealed to a lot of conservative Democrats and a lot of people who were out of work. So I think when you look at the message, his message had a stronger ring than hers.

STE ARNS: COURTESY CLIFF STE ARNS / BOOK : COURTESY CLIFF STE ARNS

[Politics]

On voting for Donald Trump: I was over in Japan two weeks before the election and Trump made some very strong statements against the Japanese, that they should help pay for the troops, and secondly, they should defend themselves. And so I got over there and they were very strongly against Trump. And I went with a Democrat from Pennsylvania who’s also a former [congressman], so he took the position of defending Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton and I took the position of talking about Trump. And I said to them when they asked me if I was going to vote for Trump, I said yes because I’m voting for Republicans, and secondly, I said, believe it or not, Trump can win if he wins the Rust Belt states—I mean Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio. And so at this point, I look pretty prophetic because that’s exactly what happened.

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IN MEMORIAM Cecil Cooper, BS ’49, (Nov. 10, 2015, Chicago), originally a machinist at General Electric, served in Italy during World War II and went on to teach at Case Western Reserve University’s Department of Biochemistry. He also was an accomplished stained-glass artisan.

Elizabeth Kline “Betty” Grinnell, BA ’51, (Oct. 26, 2016, Arlington, Va., 88) was a member of the Little Falls Presbyterian Church, Rock Spring Garden Club, Neighbors Club, National Society of Arts & Letters, Kappa Kappa Gamma and the Corinthian Yacht Club. A woman of strong faith and a homemaker, she painted, gardened and loved boating.

Charles G. Wellso, MD ’53, (March 30, 2016, Mount Vernon, Iowa, 87) was a surgeon with the 2nd Armored Division in Germany during World War II and later served as a psychiatrist at a U.S. Army hospital in France. A psychiatrist for many decades after the war, he loved gaudy Welsh pottery, playing the trumpet and a good read in English or French. At home, a book was always within reach and, often, a piece of cheese.

Stephen J. Korcheck, BA ’54, MA ’66, EdD ’70, (Aug. 26, 2016, Bradenton, Fla., 84), spent parts of four seasons from 1954 to 1959 as a catcher with the Washington Senators before going on to serve as president of the State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota, from 1980 to 1997. Also drafted by the San Francisco 49ers, he coached the GW baseball team from 1966 to 1970 and is a member of the Athletics Hall of Fame. Dr. Korcheck and his wife enjoyed tending to their rose and butterfly gardens, playing golf, traveling, and spoiling their dog Andy.

Gene Guarilia, BS ’59, (Nov. 20, 2016, Duryea, Pa., 79), a 6-foot5 small forward, played for the Boston Celtics from 1959 to 1963 and won four NBA championships before becoming a teacher and basketball coach in the Pittston (Pa.) Area School District. At GW, he averaged 17 rebounds a game. For many years, he also played bass for the Heartbeats, Sidestreet and the Cadillacs.

Nancy Carolyn Mitchell Mustafa, BA ’61, MA ’64, (Nov. 6, 2016, 76) was active in the League of Women Voters, where she taught as an adjunct professor. In her retirement, she gardened and traveled while dedicating herself to the Christian Science Church. Her father disapproved of the “hillbilly” music of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash that she loved as a teenager.

Robert M. Jimeson, Jr., MS ’64, (July 31, 2016, Vienna, Va., 95) invented Methacoal, a unique and more easily transportable mixture of coal and methane. During World War II, he worked for the aircraftmanufacturing company Glenn L. Martin and helped design the B-26 Marauder. He owned many patents and enjoyed studying, teaching and discussing science and religion.

Lawrence Winkler, EdD ’65, (Dec. 14, 2016, Annapolis, Md., 89), a U.S. Navy veteran, was a GW Professor Emeritus of Counseling and taught at GW from 1967 to 1992.

He enjoyed flying and golf.

Thomas V. Vakerics, JD ’68, (June 15, 2016, Reston, Va., 72) was an expert on antitrust matters and authored Antitrust Basics (New York Law Publishing Company, 1985) and Antidumping, Countervailing Duty and Other Trade Actions, a major legal treatise on international trade law. He traveled extensively to China, Korea and Japan and developed a respect for the craftsmanship of Japanese woodblock prints, netsukes and snuff bottles.

George Carlisle Gatje, MS ’69, (Sept. 15, 2015, Norfolk, Va., 84), spent 31 years in the U.S. Navy, retired as a captain and went on to become the head of Western Branch High School’s math department. He was a lifelong learner and educator who enjoyed reading and travel.

Susan J. Goode, BA ’69, (May 27, 2016, Charlottesville, Va., 70) established Pidgeon Hill Farm, a riding school in Berryville, Va., where she taught horsemanship for 15 years. Ms. Goode also worked at the University of Virginia Medical Center in the psychiatric and epilepsy department, where she was a pivotal part of the epilepsy surgery

program. She had a lifelong love for all animals.

Albert Willard Bellais, MFA ’70, (Oct. 20, 2016, Savannah, Ga., 82), a U.S. Navy veteran, was an associate professor in Montgomery College’s Speech and Drama Department in Rockville, Md., for 29 years. He acted in commercials, TV shows (Simon & Simon) and movies (Enemy of the People, Major League II and Guarding Tess) and also sung in the Gay Men’s Chorus of D.C. Annemarie Maguire, JD ’79, (Sept. 21, 2016, Washington, D.C., 63) worked for several government agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Treasury, where she received the Secretary’s Honor Award. Known for her quick wit, she was a storyteller, played piano and loved her cats.

Paul Schapiro, BA ’80, (June 3, 2016, 58), an accountant, was an avid bicyclist and very involved with the Napa County (Calif.) Democratic Committee and the American Canyon Lions Club. He won the 2014 Bicycle Commuter of the Year Award, which is presented by the Napa County Bicycle Coalition.

Tiffany Topcik, BBA ’88, (Feb. 2, 2016, Highland Park, Ill., 49) was an accomplished travel executive and had served as an adjunct faculty member at the New York University Tisch School of Hospitality. She loved travel, the outdoors and her dog, Reggie.

Debra Saunders-White, EdD ’04, (Nov. 26, 2016, Hampton, Va., 59) was the first permanent female chancellor of North Carolina Central University in Durham, N.C. During her three-and-half-ayear tenure, NCCU was named the 2016 Historically Black College or University of the Year by HBCU Digest.

Faculty, Staff, Trustees James Franklin Burks (Nov. 1, 2016, Washington, D.C., 86) was a professor emeritus of Romance languages and literatures and taught at GW for 34 years. He was respected for his diplomacy and

managing skills during two long terms as department chair. He loved France, especially Paris.

William Christenberry (Nov. 28, 2016, Washington, D.C., 80) was an accomplished photographer known for his work depicting the rural South, especially Hale County in Alabama. He taught at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design for 40 years and became a professor emeritus in 2008. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1984, and his work is owned by many public institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in New York, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

James Oliver Horton (Feb. 20, 2017, 73) was the Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History at GW and historian emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. A leading scholar of African American social history, he authored many books and held several high-level governmental appointments, including an appointment by President Bill Clinton to serve on the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.

CORRECTION The fall issue mistakenly reported the death of Jack V. Cohen, BA ’63, JD ’66, based on erroneous information. Mr. Cohen, who called to notify us of the error, took our goof in stride and recalled the words of Mark Twain, when the author once found himself in a similar position and told a journalist: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

We regret the error.

If you’d like to see your friend or family member mentioned on this page, please write to us at magazine@gwu.edu and include a link to their obituary, if possible, or call (202) 994–5709. g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 7 7

A lu m n i n e w s u p c om i ng show s b y g w prof e s s or s a n d a lu m n i

ARTISTS’ QUARTER

The Careful Aesthetic of Happenstance

“Curry (2013),” from Monochrome Fields, part of the permanent collection of The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. top right “Fiber One 90-Calorie Brownies (2016)” from Details: Utilitarian Abstraction bottom right “Art Review International Edition, V.1 N.2, 2003 (front),” from Cover to Cover above

7 8 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

At the Kessmann home, it’s not unusual to find parts of cardboard boxes lying around.

For years, Dean Kessmann, associate professor of photography, has cut color codes out of boxes, scanned them and printed them in large scale, up to 24 feet long.

So when his daughter was collecting Box Tops for Education, it seemed natural that he’d help. “One day, my wife asked, ‘Are these yours?’” showing him some box tops.

Mr. Kessmann said no, he’d cut them out for his daughter. “Those aren’t what she needs,” he was told. All cardboard boxes, it seems, aren’t created equal.

Many of Mr. Kessmann’s projects might sound initially like child’s play, but they’re sophisticated meditations on ephemeral, often overlooked things. Mr. Kessmann always has his eyes and ears open, and he finds inspiration in unlikely places.

Mr. Kessmann’s commute to work, for example, is artistic fodder. When he moved from St. Louis to Washington 15 years ago to teach at GW, he began taking public transportation to work for the first time. He would read magazines on the Metro, and he’d often roll them up to carry them. That’s when he noticed the inadvertent patterns of color on the fore-edges, opposite the spines.

“These austere linear abstractions are the unintended consequence of carefully designed documents, the byproduct of a painstakingly controlled internal organization,” Mr. Kessmann writes in an artist statement for a series called Cover to Cover. In the works, he clamped magazines with enormous clips and scanned the foreedges. The resulting scans look like literary barcodes, or a colorful timeline laid out on a long landscape-oriented page.

In this and other series, Mr. Kessmann chose to self-impose restrictions on the project. With the color codes, which resulted in two related projects, Utilitarian Abstraction and Details: Utilitarian Abstraction, he expanded the image as much as he could until the visual field approached something recognizable in the product packaging, like an illustration or text. He wanted to keep the works abstract, and he decided to “allow the subject matter to determine the final compositions.”

DE AN KESSMANN

//By Menachem Wecker, MA ’09

TOP: RICHARD SPRENGELER / BOT TOM: COURTESY DE AN KESSMANN

A lu m n i n e w s

These current projects were funded

by D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and the Franz and Virginia Bader Fund. Mr. Kessmann appreciates the ways that his projects build upon the conscious decisions of graphic designers, which he appropriates to call attention to the ways in which “the graphic design and printing industries have usurped the visual language of fine art, and vice versa.”

In another recent project, “Monochrome Fields,” Mr. Kessmann scanned blank sheets of paper and heightened the contrast to create abstract works, often with stunning palettes,

while in “Architectural Intersections,” he photographed the places where the walls of his house meet the ceilings. His series “A Year at a Glance” averaged all of the covers in a particular year of several art publications— such as ARTnews, Artforum and Modern Painters; the result has a ghost-like quality.

Some of his current work centers on empty layouts of Microsoft Word and Excel documents, where viewers can just make out scrolling navigation bars and the outlines of cells, but not the broader context of web browsers or top-level navigation panes.

“Anything is an option,” he says of his artistic process, “which can be, at times,

paralyzing.” He carefully considers whether an initial idea is worth pursuing and then approaches his subjects in a conceptual way without excluding the aesthetic potential of the work. “Many of these ideas come about through my daily routine.” The series “Between Here and There,” for example, was a six-year project done between other projects, in which Mr. Kessmann took photos on his walk to and from work each day.

That’s something he tells his students regularly. It is often fun to make art, but it’s also work. “In order to have an artistic practice,” he tells his students, “one must practice being an artist.”

g w m ag a z i n e .c om / 7 9

W i sd om a n d how-t o s f rom e x pert s i n t h e g w c om m u n i t y

INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE [LIBATION]

Wine-ing Down An expert offers a primer on the alcohol it took America the longest to conquer

Americans mastered beer- and liquormaking early, but wine took us a while.

Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the nation’s most famous failed vinter, tried for decades to grow European grapes in Virginia, his efforts submarined by an all-but-microscopic insect called phylloxera.

Hundreds of years later, Jefferson stands avenged.

Today, there are more than 8,000 U.S. wineries that help drive a $35 billion industry and a golden age of American wine—so says Nick Stengel, MPA ’01.

“Our knowledge of winemaking and grape-growing is just at a peak right now,” says Mr. Stengel, general manager at Wardman Wines in Northeast D.C. He also spent 12 years in fine dining, including seven as the executive chef at Willow in Arlington, Va. With that in mind, we asked Mr. Stengel, who’s pursuing a Master of Wine designation (an exclusive certificate that’s basically a PhD of wine and held by only 356 people) to impart to us a little wine knowledge. He obliged. —Matthew Stoss

1900

BACK TO THOMAS JEFFERSON FOR A MOMENT

‘A QUICK TRIP TO VINEGAR’

WHERE U.S WINE COMES FROM About 90 percent of it is Californian.

Washington state, New York, Pennsylvania and Oregon are the next biggest wine-producing states.

The best winemaking regions tend to be northern and coastal (temperate climates, distinct seasons) and are long established. But there is an upstart: the Southwest.

“They’re making some really interesting stuff—good Merlot, good Cabernets,” Mr. Stengel says.

“They get a lot of sun, and it’s dry enough where they don’t have mold problems. I think it’s an up-andcoming area.”

10

No.

Of Note

Texas is No. 10 on the list of top wineproducing states.

8 0 / g w m ag a z i n e / Spring 2017

In the absence of modern winemaking techniques (including a knowledge of bacteria and yeasts), it didn’t take long for wine to go bad.

“There are old shipping records from the 13th century in England that refer to wine that was brought into the country between the harvest and Christmas as just ‘wine,’” Mr. Stengel says. “After that, it was called ‘reek wine’ because it went bad that fast.”

So people “fortified” it with brandy, which acted as a preservative.

“They would drink dry wine for three months of the year,” Mr. Stengel says, “but otherwise they added brandy or put in pine pitch as a preservative—it tasted exactly like what you think it tasted like.”

Thomas Jefferson loved Madeira, a sweet Portuguese wine named for the volcanic archipelago where it originates. Jefferson tried to make it here but, of course, failed. Madeira was perfect for the pre-refrigeration Colonial era because, well, it is not a dainty wine.

A MULTITASKING GLASS There are many options—including the champagne flute, the only functional value of which is successfully holding liquid. A standard 12-ounce glass will cover all your wine-drinking (and wine-smelling) needs.

“I just like one that’s big enough to stick my nose into so I can get the “Ships would pull into Madeira, take smell going and big enough to swirl all the rocks out of the bottom of it around without spilling it all their boat that they used for ballast, over the place,” Mr. Stengel says. load in barrels of Madeira and ship them to India,” Mr. Stengel says. “Then bring them back and sell them for twice the price because [the wine] had been properly abused.”

LAST THING WINE LABELS ARE MOSTLY USELESS

Some are earnest.

Most aren’t, thanks to corporate marketers convinced that poetry sells. And even the earnest labels aren’t that reliable because palettes are like snowflakes: all different.

1

No.

S H I P : I S T O C K . C O M / M A C R O V E C T O R , B O T T L E S : I S T O C K . C O M / S U N S H I N E _ A R T, V I N E YA R D : I S T O C K . C O M / I R A L U

That’s about when Americans figured out how to grow European grapes here, but it’s only been in recent decades that American wine has rated globally.

Before that, especially after World War II, a lot of American wine tended to be blended “jug” wine falsely labeled with the name of some famous wine region, like Burgundy.

Most of this wine, however, was Italian-style because it was immigrant Italians in California making it.

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